The Dragonet Prophecy (10 page)

If
, Clay thought.

“Stop and rest anytime you find a place to breathe,” Starflight went on. “If you can’t find a place where the river surfaces, don’t panic or you’ll run out of air faster.”

Clay felt like he was panicking already. When he thought about swimming into inky blackness with no idea if he’d ever breathe again, his whole body tightened with fear.

He felt the brush of wing tips next to his and turned. The river eddied around the blurry outline of Glory beside him.

“Go hide,” he whispered.

“Thank you, Clay,” she said quietly. “I’ll never admit I said this, but … I want you to know I would never have made it through the last six years without the four of you.”

“Same here,” Clay said. Growing up under the mountain without Glory, Sunny, Tsunami, and Starflight would have been too miserable to bear.

“Me too,” Starflight said.

Sunny nodded. She twined her tail in Glory’s and touched one of Clay’s talons.

“Good luck,” said Glory. She stepped out of the river and melted back into the shadows.

“Be really, really careful, Clay,” Tsunami said. Her chains were taut around her legs and neck as she leaned toward them. “Come back if you have to. Don’t keep going if it’s too dangerous.”

“Don’t you dare die,” Sunny added, flinging her forearms around his neck and beating his wings with hers.

“You all stay safe, too,” Clay said. He took a deep breath, then another. “I’ll be rolling away that boulder before you know it.” He couldn’t delay any longer. He nodded to his friends and dove into the river.

Swimming helped warm him a little, but his scales still felt crusted with ice by the time he’d made it down the tunnel to the battle cave. He swam to the far wall, where the rock sloped down into the water. He floated for a moment, feeling the current tugging him. Then he inhaled and dove down.

By the flickering light of the torches above, he could see the patch of wall that was darker than the rest. Tsunami was right; this hole was smaller than the gap to the guardians’ cave. Well, it was flatter, but wider, too, more like a snarling dragon mouth, complete with sharp outcroppings like teeth. He couldn’t see anything but darkness on the other side.

Clay reached one forearm into the hole and felt nothing but emptiness. Dark water rushed past him.

He arrowed to the surface and took the longest, deepest breath of his life, hoping it wouldn’t be his last. The water closed over his head in an awful, final kind of way. He tried not to think about that.

With a few swift kicks, he swam back to the hole and grabbed the rocks on either side to brace himself. He folded his wings tightly to his body and snaked his head through the hole. His shoulders followed, then his wings, scraping painfully against the stone teeth. His front talons found a lip of rock ahead of him and he seized it, pulling himself forward.

He felt his shoulders slip into open space just as his haunches got stuck. His back claws scrabbled for a grip. He tried to flatten himself to the rock, squishing himself sideways. He wriggled as hard as he could, remembering Starflight’s instructions.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t —

He popped loose so suddenly that he spun forward, head over tail, and had to flail around with his wings to straighten himself out. As he did, he felt stone brushing his wing tips on either side. Cautiously he reached out into the darkness.

Rock pressed closely around him. The river was narrow here and the current was strong. It carried him forward even when he wasn’t trying to swim. Everything was pitch dark.

He tried paddling up to find the surface of the river, but his head barked painfully against a rock ceiling. There was no air here, only a tight channel filled by the river. He wasn’t even sure there was space to turn around if he wanted to go back.

But I don’t want to go back. I can’t go back.

Clay forced himself to swim, kicking his back legs, and waving his wings as much as he could in the cramped space. Water gurgled in his ears, as if it were laughing at his efforts. His heartbeat seemed louder than he’d ever noticed before.

He didn’t know how long he swam through the dark, twisting channel, but after a while his chest began to hurt. He had never actually tried holding his breath for an entire hour before. The dragonets only knew he could because that’s what it said about MudWings in a couple of scrolls. What if it took practice? What if only full-grown MudWings could do it? What if his lungs were still too small?

What if he drowned down here, alone, and his friends never knew what happened to him, and Kestrel killed Glory, and he really was the most useless dragonet in Pyrrhia?

I will not panic.

Clay climbed toward the surface for the hundredth time, setting his jaw stubbornly. Still only solid rock above him. But — it seemed like the rock was slanting upward. Was it? He reached his wings up to brush against the stone and swam faster.

The channel was definitely getting wider. He couldn’t feel the walls on either side of him anymore. Suddenly the rock above him disappeared as well. The strength of the current dropped away. It felt as if he’d swum out into a wide-open pool.

Clay beat his wings, rising up and up through the dark water, his tail lashing to drive him forward. He was deeper than he’d realized, far below the surface.

But — were those stars above him? He nearly sucked in a mouthful of water in excitement. Could he have made it outside already? Something was shining overhead. He could see small spots of light, like the night sky through the hole.

His head burst out of the water. Clay yelped with glee as he breathed in and out, in and out, grateful for air like he never had been before.

But his voice echoed back to him, bouncing off cave walls. This air didn’t smell like the sky, and he couldn’t hear anything beyond the stillness of rock and the fading echoes of his own cry.

He floated on the surface of the pool. The current was still moving sluggishly somewhere below his talons. All was darkness around him except for those points of light overhead.

Glowworms.

He was still under the mountain, in a cave full of thousands of glowworms.

The eerie little insects pulsed with a greenish light. Glowing tendrils hung from several of them, like a shimmering star curtain far above him and around him in the pool’s reflection. By their dim light, he could faintly see the distant arch of cave walls.

He wasn’t outside, but at least he was breathing. He followed Starflight’s advice, resting for as long as he dared. It was so cold in the water that he couldn’t feel the tip of his tail or the outer ridge of his wings. He tried breathing a spurt of fire up into the air, but his chest was too frozen to produce more than a flicker of flame. It was almost more than he could bear to make himself duck under the water again.

But finally he took another deep breath and dove.

For a terrible moment he was afraid he’d lost the current. He had no idea where he’d come in. He had no idea if the river even left this cave. What if this wide, silent pool was the end? Could he make it back to his friends, fighting that strong current the whole way?

Then he realized that when he floated, there was something carrying him along. It was weaker, but the current was still there. He spread his wings wide and stretched his tail down, letting himself drift like a leaf until he was sure which direction it went.

On the far side of the cave, in the dim light of the glowworms, he found a passageway where the river left the pool. The ceiling was still far above him. He could swim and breathe for a while longer.

Clay beat his wings to push himself forward through the water. It was peaceful and creepy at the same time, with all those star-worms glowing overhead like a million burning eyes. But it was much preferable to solid rock, complete darkness, and no air.

After a while, the current started to pick up again. Clay’s wings brushed against rocks jutting out of the river, and the glowworms were fewer and farther between. The darkness seemed to press down like Kestrel crushing him during battle training.

And then he heard the roaring.

Clay’s ears pricked up. Was it dragons? His first thought was that he was hearing Kestrel, roaring in fury as she discovered she had lost Glory and Clay. But he was too far away to hear anything like that.

Then he started to worry. What
would
Kestrel do when she found Clay and Glory missing? Would she punish the others — especially Tsunami, all chained up and unable to fight back?

He was so distracted worrying about his friends that it took him a while to notice that the roaring was getting louder. Suddenly he bashed into a boulder sticking out of the river. Reeling with pain, Clay spun in the water, flailing for a hold on something.

He crashed into another rock, bounced off, and slammed into yet another. The river was going so fast now that he couldn’t stop himself. He was being dragged toward the roaring at top speed.

With a jarring shock, he hit a spur of stone and dug in with all his talons. The rushing water whipped past him, seizing his tail and his wings with icy, desperate fingers. Clay fought his way out of the river until finally he stood, gasping, on bare rock.

He swept his tail around, trying to feel how big a rock he was standing on. It was big — it stretched farther than he could reach. He edged forward until he was sure he was standing on the bank of the river. A slope beside him rose away from the water.

He could feel a small trickle of a stream bubbling down the slope, joining the river near his talons. Clay dropped his head, trying to think. Now that he was out of the water, the cold was penetratingly deep. It coiled and twisted around his bones.

He coughed, hoping to summon a flame, but it was no use. Some dragons carried fire within them always — a SkyWing or a NightWing could blast flames anytime. SeaWings and IceWings could never breathe fire. But others, like MudWings, needed the right conditions — warmth most of all.

Remembering all his fire-breathing failures, Clay could hear Kestrel’s scornful voice hissing about what a disappointment he was.
Not this time
, he thought.
I will figure this out.

He could guess what the roaring was, although he had never seen a waterfall. And he certainly didn’t want to experience one for the first time in total darkness. Even if he could fly over it, without his sight he’d be sure to run into something and crash.

But he couldn’t leave the river — could he?

Clay set one claw in the trickling stream and was surprised to find it was a little warmer than the river. Where did it come from? Up … surely up meant closer to the surface and the outside world.

He inhaled, hoping to catch the scent of the outside. But the only faint smell was of rotten eggs.

He set his jaw. The stream had to lead somewhere. Somewhere not over a waterfall. Clay spread his wings to feel the cave walls and crept up the stream, slipping now and then on the slick stone.

Soon he felt a ledge ahead of him. He climbed over it and splashed into a deeper pool. The rotten-egg smell was much stronger up here. He tried to wade forward, and the water crept up his legs. Suddenly he felt a stinging pain slice through the softer scales of his underbelly. With a hiss, he scrambled back up on the ledge.

His wings caught on something sticky overhead, and he felt the same sharp pain shivering through his tendons. He pulled his wings in close to his body, quickly, but the stickiness came with it and suckered onto his scales like enormous, globby leeches. It felt like the poison in Dune’s tail stabbing him in a thousand places, dissolving his skin from the inside out.

Clay let out an agonized yell and tried to stumble back down the slope to the river. But he’d lost the feel of the stream under his claws. He was stumbling blind over bare rocks. Frantic to escape the pain, he lunged toward the sound of the waterfall.

His head collided with something hard that knocked him to the cave floor.

As he lost consciousness, his last thought was,
I failed them.

Freezing water splashed over Clay’s head. He woke up with a gasp as the rest of his body was plunged into the river. Strong talons gripped his shoulders, shoving him under the water.

He thrashed, terrified, and the current nearly dragged him away. The other dragon yanked his head into the air and shouted, “Quit struggling! I’m saving you!”

Clay went limp and let himself be shoved under again. He felt the sticky poison washing from his scales, although the pain lingered. As his panic died down, memory clicked on. He lunged back to the surface.

“Tsunami!” he yelped. He tried to wrap his wings around her, flapping and splashing in the dark.

Her claws dug into the spines along his back. “Seriously, Clay, stop moving!” She whacked his tail back into the water with her own. “I don’t know what this white stuff is, but it smells awful, and I think it’s trying to dissolve your scales. You stay in the water until it’s all gone.”

She moved his claws to the rock and helped him hang on against the fierce current while she poured more water over his head. He strained his eyes, trying to see her, or even a black shadow that might be her, but it was too dark. He clung to the feeling of her cold, wet scales against his. She was really here.