The Dragon Book (40 page)

Dragon of air.

Dragon of dust.

Dragon of stone.

Dragon of water.

Dragon of cloud.

He reeled back as the full import of what he had unleashed sank in. Even the crabblers, now gripped together in a grotesque tangle of legs and fat bodies, had been coopted by the dragons into their bizarre masquerade.

“Why don’t you leave well enough alone?” Zilant had asked.

Ros should have listened to him. Now he had killed one dragon and disturbed a whole nest of them. That was the price he would have to pay for freedom.

From exhaustion and fear, strength arose. He wasn’t a dragon, but he was a dragon’s apprentice. Master Pukje had taught him well. The Change poured through him like an ocean through a river mouth. He wouldn’t stop to talk this time. He had killed one dragon already. What were six more when his future was at stake?

The dragons roared at him, approaching on all sides. The ground quaked under their mighty feet, but he stood firm. They couldn’t all attack at once. Fire would boil water and turn sand to glass. Crabblers would shy away and clouds would evaporate to nothing.

Raising both hands, he summoned the flame that he knew so well.

A bright glow blossomed around him, and it seemed for a moment as though the sun had grown in strength. Heat rippled across his skin, and his eyes were dazzled.

But it wasn’t the sun at all. The light came from the web encasing his body. The fire issuing from his hands had set it alight. The glare grew brighter still and the heat more intense until suddenly, with a flash, his entire body was aflame.

He screamed, and the air from his lungs whipped the fire even higher. Great sheets burst from him, rising up and out to either side, and behind him, too, tasting the earth like a tongue. He felt himself lifted by the heat, even as his hair shrivelled and his clothes burned away. The flames lapped at the air, flapped once, and he was aloft.

The dragon of fire surged forward, and Ros was carried with it, inside its belly. Together they left a broad black scar wherever they passed.

“BREATHE easy, boy. This won’t take long.”

Ros recognised that voice. It belonged to the dragon he had just killed. That knowledge did little to quell his panic.

“What’s happening to me?”

“Nothing,” Zilant said. “This has nothing to do with you. It’s all about the seven of us, of which your master is the last and youngest. For sending a man to do a dragon’s job, he will pay dearly. But this was what he wanted: to wake us for a while, to remind us that our blood still boils. An insult will serve when entreaty has failed so many times before.”

Ros could barely think through the pain.
Nothing
, the dragon said, but it felt like everything.

“Fly with me,” said Zilant from the fire all around him, “just this once, as we pay our brother a visit.”

Ros blazed with the dragon until it seemed there was nothing left to burn. His flesh went first, then his memories, then the person he had tried to be: the student, the adult, the lover …

The only thing that wouldn’t burn was the silver pendant that Adi had given him. Not even the heat in a fire dragon’s belly could melt it. He clung to it tightly and prayed for release.

“I’D be dead if it wasn’t for you,” she had told him, once. “I would’ve run off on my own, and the crabblers would’ve got me.”

It had all seemed so simple, five years earlier. The currents of their lives had swept them together but would sweep them apart again forever if given the chance. The decision had been easy for him to make.

“I promise I’ll come back to you.”

“Well, I promise to wait,” she had replied. “Just don’t die or anything and leave me waiting forever. That could be a little annoying.”

“I’ll even try to write,” he had said, and at times he had, albeit through Change-rich means like talking parrots and their ilk.

“You’d better,” she had said, “but I guess I won’t be able to write back, seeing Pukje wants to keep everything a secret.”

Somehow she had found a way. The pages were rolled up in his pack, a testament to her determination. Too young to wed, Ros and Adi were not too young to make a vow that would bind them into adulthood. Neither of them had made that vow lightly, but neither had they realised how heavy it would turn out to be.

“I promised I’d come back,” he had told her, “and I will.”

THE chase didn’t last long: six dragons against one, one they knew as well as they knew each other, one they would follow to the ends of the earth if needed. Pukje—the dragon of flesh, crafty and wise in the ways of the earth, but so weighed down with its concerns that he taught humans the secrets of his kind—sprang into the sky the moment his siblings appeared on the horizon, boiling and burning and babbling in their animal tongues. He sprinted as fast as his wings would carry him, and they set off right after him, dragons streaking across the firmament like shooting stars, six against one, and the earth shaking beneath them.

WHEN Ros finally woke, he found himself flat on his back, spread-eagled and fully clothed. The leather of his breeches was stiff with dried water and his tunic full of sand, but no actual harm appeared to have been done to him. He swept his matted hair out of sleep-crusted eyes and looked all around him.

The sun had risen, so he could see clearly that he was back in the Divide, back where it had all started. And more than that: the pool, the patch of discoloured rock, the cloud, the steady breeze—even the web, stretching lazily above him—they were back, too, as though the whole thing had been a dream.

Could it have been? Frowning, he relived the confused moments of the chase: wide jaws and clutching talons; tails whipping and wings slapping all around him. He and Zilant—for an immeasurable time, there had been no distinction between them.

By daylight, though, the dragon was invisible. The web was just a web, swaying in the breeze.

With a shaking hand, Ros reached out to pluck the nearest strand.

Seeing the scars on his skin—thousands of tiny lines, crossing and recrossing like a road map of the Haunted City—he thought,
No, best not.

Instead, Ros clambered to his feet and considered his options.

The nest of dragons, it seemed, was sleeping again. Several crabblers clung unmoving on the parallel cliff-faces, watching him come to his senses with no more than their own intelligence. Not far away lay the wreckage of the strand beast, its legs intact but the bottles, the source of its motive power, completely destroyed.

What should he do now? He couldn’t leave without understanding what had happened to him. Dream or no dream? Free or trapped forever?

Did the answer depend entirely on how one looked at the question?

A blackened, hunched thing that Ros had taken for a rock raised its head and looked at him.

“I release you,” said Master Pukje, “from my service.”

Ros ran to him. The fallen dragon’s skin was burned to a crisp, but the eye that inspected him shone with a familiar, incisive light.

“Are you all right? Who did this to you?”

“You did, I think.”

“No, master, I wouldn’t—”

Pukje croaked a laugh at the expression on Ros’s face. “All right, then. It was Zilant.” His crisped wings twitched. “Does that make you feel better?”

Ros recoiled, unsure if he was being mocked with affection or contempt, or both. “I don’t understand. I did exactly as you told me—”

“You did.”

“I found the dragon. I destroyed the web.”

“You killed him. I know. Then the others came, and you went to burn them. The web caught fire, and Zilant returned.”

Ros nodded. “How is that possible?”

“He burns and lives again. Don’t ask me how. We’re dragons. We’re different from you. We find our own ways to survive the world. You were caught up in all that for a while, but you’re free now. You’ll have to find a way to survive on your own, and that flame is a harder master than I ever was.”

Ros squatted down and rested on his haunches. Pukje’s breathing was laboured. Raw pink patches were visible through the crisped skin.

“You expected this to happen,” Ros said, meaning more than just their injuries. “This was the proof you were waiting for.”

“Proof; punishment. Tell me the difference, and you can be my teacher.”

“You sent me to stir them up, to remind them of—what? That they were still alive? That you were?”

“Solitude is bad for the soul.” The hunched spine lifted, then fell. “Perhaps I knew that I would be lonely when you were gone. Perhaps I wanted to be with my family for a little while.”

Ros stared at the injured dragon, appalled for both of them—until a raspy, painful sound revealed that Pukje was laughing at him. Again.

He supposed he deserved it.

“Change to your human form,” Ros said. “I’ll carry you back to Laure, where you’ll be looked after.”

“No need.”

“I can’t just leave you here.”

“Why not? After a short nap, I’ll wake refreshed. Go live your life, as my siblings and I cannot.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re ready to wake from the dream of your youth. Be reborn and engage with the world. Fighting fire with fire gets you nothing but ashes, no? Most important of all—” Here Pukje coughed, long and hacking, releasing clouds of soot from his lungs. “Remember never to tangle with a dragon while it’s dreaming.”

Ros stood, remembering the colours of his wild flight across the land with Zilant. It had been like diving into a living sunset. The feeling had been liquid and furious, joyous and terrifying at the same time. He had
been
fire, and would never use it the same way again.

But the scars on his hands and arms weren’t burns. They were left by the dragon’s web, where it had touched and clung to him, leaving stigmata that all could see. Perhaps he wasn’t quite the dragon-killer he had imagined himself to be the previous night, but there were worse things, such as being deformed by someone else’s dream.

He squarely confronted the fear that Adi might be having her own doubts. The letter she had sent wasn’t just a testament to determination. It exposed her own uncertainty, too. Thinking of the words she had used, he could see all too clearly now that she was as nervous as he, and taking shelter in conventions alien to both of them.