Chapter 7
Wistala used the walls and ceiling again on her way out, now sure of the route and good places to rest. She wasn’t afraid of being taken unaware by pursuit; the bloody-handed dwarves might as well bang their shields against the walls for all the noise they made.
She feared and hated them. It would be hard to say which emotion was the stronger—perhaps her fear, that she would end up another headless, sii-less, saa-less corpse robbed of life and skin itself.
Her body wasn’t equal to the anger she felt. It hung above her, vast and thick, like a storm cloud. One day she might be able to inhale that cloud, take it into her body and use it to fuel her vengeance for a butchered family.
One day. When I am strong. I’m too weak now.
Weak wasn’t the word for it, more like exhausted, drained . . . Every muscle in Wistala’s body ached as she climbed out of the cave. She inched forward as she emerged, not knowing what sort of help her brother might have summoned. Furtive creeping was her only defense. She wouldn’t be able to put up any more of a fight than a slug, thanks to her weariness and the cold despair in her hearts.
The smell of fresh air steeled her limbs and gave her a last burst. As she climbed up through the creepers at the mouth of the cave and squeezed into an old crack in the battlements, she felt as though her body was sloughing off her limbs to puddle beneath her. She joined it, slid down a rushing slide of fatigue, and slept.
Wistala awoke to alarm that she couldn’t smell Auron. The events of the previous day came back in a rush, along with the tumult of emotions. Not true emotions, rather echoes of them. The fear, the anger, the disgust, the despair all felt cold and dead and dark, leaving her spiritless.
Was it just yesterday she had lost one brother, and fought another?
I’m done for. The world’s too much for me. It’ll have me, too, in the end.
She would have laughed at the dreams of were-blood taken from the dwarves were it not too much effort. Never to smell Mother’s rich, comforting scent, spin gemstones on the egg shelf with Jizara, listen to Father’s approach with awe and a little fear at the bloody odors . . .
A beetle probed the dirt of a crack in the battlement above her eye. She could pick it with a flick of her tongue and crunch it down, but it still sought sustenance with the determination of one who knew only instinct. It knew nothing of doom or enemies or the vast indifference of this uncaring, friendless world.
“I shall be you for a time, beetle.”
The beetle hunted so that it might eat, unaware of its own near destruction. And so should she.
She crept out of the cold crack. Everything on her hurt, especially the gripping maniples of her sii. She got behind an old wall, or perhaps it was a paved path; it was wide and low, and thick brush almost turned it into a tunnel.
It was morning on the other side of the mountains, she guessed. Here the land lay shadowed and cold under a purple sky. The clouds above slowly warmed, and she took advantage of the twilight to explore a broken tower. From an arrow-slit next to a stony ledge, she examined the approaches to the cave.
No campfires. No dwarves. No hunting dogs. No men. Elves you wouldn’t see until their bowstrings sang your death. Some wide-winged birds circled above the woods and meadows; others sat on bare tree limbs with a good view of open ground, preening or keeping watch. Their behavior was regular: they didn’t suddenly change course or startle or cry out, as they would if hunters were prowling the woods. To the north, more mountains, a long line of them, snowy tops tinged with morning gold. Father was up there somewhere, but he wouldn’t even be a dot at this distance.
If he still lived.
Wistala sniffed the air, smelled mountain goat droppings in the grassy interstice filling the bottom of a rocky runnel. The beetle would no doubt find the clumps tasty. She preferred the source.
Wistala followed the smells at a slow stalk with a thoughtless—but not senseless—appetite.
 
Wistala didn’t need to follow the Bowing Dragon during the day, since the mountains appeared to run more or less north. She kept to the dead area above most of the trees but below the snow. Brilliant green moss the color of her scales covered every rock, evidence to some play of wind and weather that meant mists at these heights almost every morning and night.
While moving in open sunlight meant she could be observed, she’d rather see trouble from a distance than worry what might be around the next scraggly pine tree.
Water was plentiful—the mountains were shedding their winter weight of snow, and it came down in innumerable streams. The streams carried more than just refreshing water and bits of bark and leaf on a long journey down the mountain; they were full of tasty frogs that wiggled delightfully as they went down Wistala’s long throat.
By evening she’d crossed over two shoulders and had to face a decision. The mountains curved away west before going north again, and she could save herself a good deal of time by cutting across the valley, going the same distance in a quarter of the dragon-lengths. But it would mean plunging into thick forest. Trees could mean men, or worse, elves.
But trees also meant warm-blooded, furry, four-footed feasting, marrow-filled bones to crunch, and juicy eyeballs for sucking.
Appetite and the desire to hurry north, hopefully to find Father somewhere plotting destruction to the dwarves, won out over caution. She descended into the valley.
Patient trees waited for her. Soon she could see only slivers of sky around the tops of pines.
“Grounddragon look look!” a blue jay shrieked. It fluttered to a lower branch to scream at her: “Nestraider! Nestraider!”
Birdspeech made hatchling babble seem sophisticated.
“News! Dragon lives?” a swift answered from a nearby tree. Wistala couldn’t see it.
“Lives, lives, the grounddragon lives,” the jay called back.
“I won’t raid your nests,” Wistala said. “Why would it be news that I live?”
“Such news! News! Sparrow say grackle say thrush say elf-hawk say elves kill grounddragon,” the swift called.
“Nestraider! Nestraider!” the jay insisted.
“I will raid your nests if you don’t shut that thorn you use for a beak. When was this grounddragon killed, swift?”
“Not-today,” the swift answered.
Perhaps birdbrains had room for only two concepts of time: something that happened today and Everything Else. Auron might still live, somewhere. The birds might be gossiping about a killing in the area from weeks and weeks ago.
But she wondered—and her fire bladder went cold. Could birds keep a thought in their singsong heads that long?
Mother said some elves understood birdspeech. Wistala didn’t want her comings and goings sung about through the whole forest. She knew she couldn’t convince them to lie. Then she’d have to come up with an alternative truth they could understand. “Good riddance. We not-dragons don’t like them.”
“Nestraider! Nestraider!”
“You look like a dragon,” the swift said, and Wistala finally spotted him sheltering in the notch between two thick branches. She’d seen him only because he raised his whitish chin to speak.
“No, I’m a not-dragon. Though we look a lot like dragons and are often mistaken for them, that’s why we hate them so.”
“Nestraider! Nestraider!”
“Not-dragons don’t raid nests!” Wistala said. She marched off into the forest, tail held high, exposing her vent to the still-screaming jay.
“I’ve met a not-dragon,” the swift bubbled. “The sparrows must hear of this!”
 
The next day she cut through another wooded valley and crossed a low rocky ridge in the middle of the forest. It was honeycombed with caves of assorted sizes and, unfortunately, empty nests. There was good snake hunting in the rocks. All she had found to eat in the forest was a white-eyed possum, which had been wandering around in the daylight in a muddled daze. It stank like disease, but she still ate it. Mother had said that the illnesses that plagued mammals wouldn’t affect dragons.
Snake hunting was all quickness, and it appealed to Wistala. One good thump behind the head, and a snake’s back was broken, leaving a thick feast that fit neatly down one’s throat. She got one bulging black-cave serpent that had recently eaten a large rat or a baby raccoon, judging from the size of the bulge in its midsection, thus giving her two meals with one jump.
She felt dirty, and found a rock where she could bend and stretch and extend her scales to the afternoon sun. Sunlight cleaned the crevices around the scale-root almost as well as water but felt a sky’s worth warmer, especially with a snake dinner inside.
A prrum might even have been forming in her throat, until her memories betrayed her: Auron would have been a fine snake-hunter, quick as he was. Why couldn’t he be with her?
Stop it, Tala. Auron is in the past, gone save for a scratch on a rock and your memories.
Except for his head and his claws, perhaps. What sort of wretched hominid ritual are they being incorporated into? Mother said the hominids used dragonkind for medicines and magic, if they were lucky enough to get one down.
“Stupid hearts. Give him up.”
Or did they know something she didn’t?
Wistala looked to the sky, to the late afternoon sun, now disappearing behind a bank of clouds. There’d be a rain tonight, if not a storm. She should nap on the ridge, and then shelter from the storm in one of the caves.
And lose half a day finding Father.
She picked her route down the ridge.
 
Wistala would have avoided the great claw-shaped cave, for it smelled like bears—but for the sounds wafted up from it. A breeze blew out of the cave. Perhaps it was another chimney from the Lower World, similar to the one she’d climbed with Auron.
As this one didn’t have to travel most of the way up a mountain, the path to the Lower World must be shorter. It conducted sounds, strange rhythms that couldn’t be natural, unless the air was moaning on its way up thousands of individual channels.
She ventured into the cave, found a bone-strewn ingress that had been collecting odds and ends since the forming of the world. But a trio of cracks sent air and sound up from below.
Voices.
She couldn’t pick out individual words, and indeed she could hardly swear that the voices she heard weren’t in her imagination rather than some trick of wind. But the rhythm repeated itself again and again every hundred heartbeats or so.
A song.
No dragon song—that, she’d be able to comprehend. Probably dwarves, singing as they worked or buckled on helm and shield to go kill more hatchlings. This was not a light, glad sound like that of a bird happy to get the morning dew off its feathers; this was a dirge such as a mother dragon might sing over empty, broken eggs. She hoped Father had given the dwarves reason to lament.
Dwarf voices meant dwarf tunnels, chambers, and mines. She must be getting near the tower-girded lake.
And Father.
 
Sing-song a dragon’s dead!
No more wingwinds, no more dread,
Sing-song, a firestarter’s dead!
 
The song awoke Wistala from her predawn nap beneath a fallen tree. Some surviving branches still held up part of the bole, and a fresh start emerged from one of the roots—a testament to the resiliency of oaks—and she’d taken shelter beneath it, waking to find fresh spiderwebs all around and the birds cheering.
Wistala’s chest heart shrank to the size of one of the wrapped flies in the web by her nose.
Curse the birds and their tinder-dry nests. “What news?” she called in birdspeech.
“Great news, giant log-turtle,” a grackle chirped. “A dragon’s down by the river-gorge.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Look under the buzzards, then. Already they gather.”
Wistala came out from under the log, and the birds went silent. She heard some tiny frightened peeps.
A tall pine stood nearby. She ran to it, climbed its regular, neatly spaced rungs as high as she dared. She saw mountains and many treetops and butterflies and an overcast pushed up against the snowcaps but—
No. There they are. Oh for my wings, for just one hour’s use of my wings!
She went down the pine recklessly, headfirst, in a series of controlled falls, letting the springy wood and interlaced branches catch her, not caring how the needles stuck or the sap clung to her.
She landed with a thump.
Wistala hurried through the forest, crashing through bramble and sending dead leaves flying, leaving a trail a blind elf could follow by touch. The first hot rush wore off, and she settled into an agonized dogtrot, her breath now louder than her footfalls.
The ground became treacherous and thin soiled, with pines and beeches clinging to strips of earth between rocks flattened and rounded and moss-bitten. She jumped, reached a prominence where she could see through the scattered trees, and corrected her course across blue-green stone with sharp edges that bit her sii.
Dragons aren’t built like horses or wolves, though their legs can get them over short distances at speeds that surprise—and kill—the unwary. They walk over long distances easily, resting tail and head on the ground frequently with weight otherwise divided between their four powerful limbs. But they are poor runners beyond the limits of a dragon-dash.
Wistala, though thick-bodied and strong, was no exception. After the first burst, all she had to give in her run was determination. She matched it against the fire in her lungs, the pain in her high-joints, the fatigue in her muscles. Her field of vision shrank until she saw the forest as though through a long dark tunnel. Hearing was gone save for the sound of her hearts pounding; all she could smell was blood-tinged saliva flowing from her mouth, thanks to stress-ruptured vessels in her long lungs.
White froth hung from her dry mouth.
She hit the gorge first, crashing through bushes, scattering berries that bruised into sickly scent. Only a quick saa-dig saved her tumble down the hillside.
Steep-sided, fern-covered fells flanked a river of frothing white and mist. Just beyond a rainbow created by the rising water, the river threw a wide loop around a prominence that resembled the upper half of hominid leg bone. A long wall of rock ran out to a knoblike point, surrounded on all sides by water.
The carrion birds circled above the stony bulge. Every now and then one would dip its wings and go lower and the others would follow; then it would rise again, but never quite so high as when she had first marked them.
Just when her body needed to hurry most, it betrayed her. She tripped, she stumbled, lost in a yellow-and-pink fog that played tricks on her vision.
Then she stood on the peninsula, the river rushing in opposite directions a dragon-length to either side, the peninsula riven and notched like vertebrae. Her run became a stagger on stones treacherous with green slimes and gray lichens.
Then to the knob, a scarp like a castle keep with ferns clinging to the side as though they were freshly hatched spiders drying themselves on the egg sac. The birds no longer whirled above.
Wistala smelled dragonblood, and the mists cleared. Ancient irregular steps were cut into the side of the rock prominence, but ferns had taken over. She climbed the stairs on a carpet of green.
The rock was somewhat flatter at the top, stonework like that of the battlements outside the home-cave crowning it. Three mighty toothlike obelisks stood upright, rough hewn, with lichen blurring glyphs carved into the sides facing each other. Had they all been standing, they would have made a roofless cage, but the rest had fallen with broken pieces strewn all about. They lay on their sides, half-covered by jagged pines all leaning upstream.
The ruin of her father lay in a depression in the center, his own blood in a pool all around. Feathered spikes thrust into riven scales covered his back like fur. He had but five horns now, one was broken off at a great notch in his crest, and he couldn’t fold one griff thanks to an ax-head stuck in it. Blood ran from under his sii.
“Father!”
Brown-and-white carrion birds, perched at the tops of the obelisks, took wing at her cry.
She dashed to him, licked at a dimpled wound under one closed eye that hardly even bled. She didn’t begin to know how to manage the rest.
His other side was just as bad. The hilt of some mighty weapon, notched like an arrow but the size of a spear, projected about the length of her tail from his side. The back was attached to a chain, and the chain to a heavy round ball that had cracked the ancient stone where it landed. Had father flown dragging that?
“Ayangthe, I’ve hurt myself on the slate pile. Jumped too far down. Is Mother asmelled?”
“Father, it’s Wistala. Wistala.”
Father grimaced. “You’re a star, Wistala—I saw you twinkling beneath dear Irelia last night. You, Auron, and Jizara all in a row. I’ll be up there soon. Wait.”
“Do open your eye, Father.”
“Can’t. Light hurts.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” one of the condors croaked. “He’s done for.”
Wistala ignored the judgment, though she admired his birdspeech. It had a loftier tone than the grain-brained bush-hoppers.
“You’re only making it harder for him,” the condor continued from his high obelisk.
What had Mother told her to do with wounds? Oh, it was in one of her Lessons. The hatchling and the wounded tiger, of course! Dwarf’s-beard! It loved rotting old logs, especially damp ones.
“Father, I’ll be right back. I’m going to help you.”
Novosolosk, the little black dragon, had just ventured above ground. . . .
She looked up at the condor: “Fair warning! I see any of you pecking at him, I’ll be venting feathers for a week.”
“Perish the thought.” The condor fluffed up his feathers and settled. “I’m eager to see how you manage this.”
While hunting rock rats, Novosolosk found himself trapped atop a low jungle kopje by a great tiger. The tiger prowled round and round the base of the kopje, growling and panting.
She looked off the east side of the knob at the river-turn. Sure enough, masses of logs had washed up against the rocks at the base of the peninsula, wetted by the constant spray of white water. Along with more mundane lichens, tufts of gray hung from cracks and knotholes in the logs.
Novosolosk tried to bargain with the tiger for safe passage out of his territory, but the tiger just spat abuse in return. He noticed an arrow through the tiger’s neck, broken shafts sticking out either side of his coat, the orange and white gone brown with blood and green with pus.
“Tiger, tiger, I can extract that arrow. . . .”
Hope gave her tired body new life. She eschewed the cut rocks for a quicker climb down the side of the knob. Going down would be easier than coming back up. . . .
Novosolosk went to the swamp, the tiger padding along just behind, its hot breath on his tail and drops of saliva falling like rain. He expected the tiger to jump at any point . . .
Sure enough, a few of the logs had thick growths of dwarf’s-beard. The plant appeared to like broken-off ends, for some reason, or split trunks. It spilled out of the rotting black wood in a thick thatch of gray, interlaced and layered and almost woven in a way that made it difficult to tell where the growth began and where it ended. It reminded Wistala of the hair shirt from the man Father brought back to the cave for Auron to learn hominid-killing. One final test.
As the tiger groaned away, Novosolosk broke a piece of the moss at a thick joint. It was joined by a whitish band. He blew on the band. It stretched and waved in his breath but did not break. . . .
She tore off two hunks of moss, carried it in her mouth back up the stairs, feeling a bit like a bullfrog she’d seen croaking away in a stream with his windbag expanded under his chin. She took the stairs in a series of leaps.
Novosolosk crushed the moss in his sii and pulled out the arrow with one quick motion. The tiger yowled and swatted him across the crest, but he pressed the mass to either side of the hole the arrow left. Dwarf’s-beard both staunched the flow and cleaned the wound, so powerful is its magic, and the tiger’s angry fever came down. . . .
She listened to Father’s heart when she crept under his wounded sii. Father would not move his limb; she had to wedge herself into the gap between body and arm like a river clam and then flex her back so she could get at the wound.
The ugly red gash gave off a pulse of blood from one end, a steady flow from the other. She packed the wound with dwarf’s-beard, crushing its laced branches with her sii until they were sticky with the whitish gunk. It had been a brave dwarf that came so close to his sii to open the bronze dragon’s breast with his ax.
Father looked relieved as soon as she wiggled free of his armpit, although whether this was from instinct at being able to press the wound closed again or comfort brought by the dwarf’s-beard, she couldn’t say.
The stream of blood feeding the pool Father lay in slowed.
Wistala sank to her joints.
“Thank you, Novosolosk.”