Chapter 4
If you’re patient enough, and keep still, out of sight and smell, the prey will feed itself right up to you.
Mother’s words echoed in Wistala’s memory as she waited for a slug above the cave moss. According to Mother, it was spring above ground, and snow was melting and finding its way into their cave, feeding flush new growth of moss. And with the moss came more slugs.
She clung, upside down, content to just roll her eyes as she searched for a pale, slow-moving back. Sometimes you could hear the soft slurp, like dragon tongue against the roof of one’s mouth, but with water dribbling and dripping into the cave from a hundred inlets, hunting by ear was impossible. With so many old trails criss-crossing the cavern floor, the nose was useless unless one came upon a still-slimy trail. So that left watching.
Of course, she had more to worry about than being able to properly push off, turn, and land near enough to the slug so she could catch it on the drop or the first pounce. The Gray Vex was prowling and snuffling around near the waterfall whose pool fed her slug. It would be just like him to come blundering through in that off-kilter leaping style of his, scaring every slug away until the next scale-shed.
“With every day closer to drakehood, he’ll be more restless,” Mother had said. “Then he’ll wander out and never return. Or your father will drive him out.”
“How many more days?” Jizara had asked, probing the hole left by a missing scale where Auron had pounced on her.
“You’ll think differently when he’s gone. I know I did with my brother Culekin—Wind Spirit knows what’s become of him.”
Drakka usually stayed closer to their home caverns until a new clutch of eggs came, or so Mother predicted. But Mother needed at least a year in the Upper World to get her strength back, during which she’d teach them much huntcraft. Then she’d fly with Father—
Snick-snick-snick-snick came the sound of Auron’s claws as he tore through the moss patch, nose held to the ground and griff half extended. Probably following the copper’s scent again.
So much for hunting.
She aimed, kicked off, and dropped. Twisting as she fell, she landed in a patch of cave moss with half a mind to pounce the Gray Vex, but by the time she gathered herself, his tail-tip had disappeared toward the pool. Whatever else might be said of her brother, he was fast.
Wistala turned, and froze.
Two hard eyes the color of flowing blood stared into hers. The copper!
They stood nose-tip to nose-tip, the copper a trifle smaller and a good deal lighter. His scales had come in small and crooked, and his maimed sii had turned in toward his body, though he propped himself up by the forejoint.
He lowered his griff a claw-breadth or two, pulled back his lips to reveal his rows of teeth. She backed up, sidestepped, and he advanced, matching her, nostrils opposite hers as though she were playing a game in the cavepool, trying to outwit her reflection.
“What’s my name?” he asked.
The question, put in simple Drakine, stunned her so she hardly understood what he said. He may as well have spoken one of the more obscure Elvish dialects to her.
“Wha—?”
“What’s my name?” he asked again, and this time she found an answer.
“I don’t know.”
“Out of my way or I’ll kill you,” he said.
His eyes kept flicking in the direction Auron had taken.
Wistala didn’t know what he expected to accomplish. He was smaller than she, and Auron was bigger still, at least in length. Auron had bested the copper in every contest they’d had. She should bleat a warning, scream and have Auron come running as he did when they came out of their eggs.
But the Gray Vex had a big enough head. A bite or two would do him good.
She ate a few dead dropped bats on her way back to the egg shelf, upset for some reason. They made slugmeat taste like fresh horse, but her gut needed something to work on beyond vague worry.
She climbed up onto the eggshelf. Jizara was matching herself against Mother’s tail-tip, standing up when it stood, rolling when it rolled, a prrum in her throat.
“Mother, I was hunting slugs, and—”
“Earth Spirit,” Jizara said. “You get any thicker, and your tail will disappear!” Jizara proudly displayed her long, lean tail, and she never tired of matching her extremities to those of her stumpier sister.
“Jizara, don’t tease. Wistala, you’re all latent wingbone, as I was, and short limbs are the stronger for it.” Mother, despite the more plentiful meals since the melt began, was breathing audibly from the effort of the tail game.
“Mother, the copper is after Auron.”
Mother stared, long and slow, out into the depths of the cave. “I’d hoped he’d left. Auron may kill him. Your father never knows when to back down either.”
“Maybe they’ll do each other in,” Jizara said. “We’ll have more food and a little quiet.”
“Every hatchling is precious,” Mother said. “There are few enough left, and it’s the rare drake who grows to dragonhood these days.”
“If there are fewer drakes, that means fewer songs sung to dragonelles,” Jizara said.
“Well, in the North—”
“Mother! Mother! Mother!” came a hatchling’s shout. “Others!
Assassins, dwarves, here in the cave.” Auron jumped clean to the egg shelf, his stripes hard and black against his skin and blood running from behind his crest. Wistala heard metal ring against stone somewhere in the cave, felt her scales rise.
Mother swept her tail around Wistala and her sister, putting her body between whatever approached and her daughters. “We are discovered?”
Auron turned this way and that, going in three directions at once. “They’re here. With spears, Mother.”
Mother looked out into the gloom of the cavern. “No! I’m faint with hunger, and the winter’s been so—”
Mother reached up with her long neck and put her mouth about a loose stalactite. She wrenched it free, and Wistala felt air move. “I hope you aren’t too big for this, my hatchlings. Auron, take your sisters and go to the surface. At once! Climb, my love, climb.” She shoved Wistala up the wall with her nose.
Wistala climbed toward the patch of shadow with the faintly new air flowing down from it.
Wistala looked down at the egg shelf, where chaos ruled. Jizara clung to Mother’s leg, all eyes and bristling scales and fluttering griff. Auron stood at the egg shelf, tail twitching, crest-shrouded eyes fixed on ranks of approaching mounds of metal and muscle, short-legged fellows with beards that glowed like fire. Had they drunk some latter-day dragonfire before charging into the cavern?
She almost lost her grip with her sii as she counted the numbers. Behind the dwarves, she saw what she took to be an exceptionally tall dwarf or broad man in black armor. The tall figure wore a winged helm and gestured with a broad-headed spear that sparked and glowed as though it had a life of its own. He pointed it toward the egg shelf, and dwarves bearing some kind of wood-and-metal contraption on their backs hurried up a broken stalagmite. With his other hand, he held the straining lines of a pack of hairy-backed dogs the size of ponies.
Mother, her head level with Wistala and imploring Jizara to release her grip, must have seen them, too. Wistala got a brief thought—Him! Gobold has sold us out!—before Mother reached down and picked Auron up by the base of his neck. She threw him into the air toward the hole. Auron twisted as he flew and struck next to Wistala at the opening. Wistala reached and held him as he found his grips. As he breathed, Auron’s ribs moved so fast, they were a blur.
Dwarven climbing poles struck the egg shelf with a klank!
“Climb! Auron, climb!” Mother called.
Jizara, we’re up here. Climb with us! Wistala thought, but her sister retreated behind Mother’s hindquarters as the first dwarf-helm appeared over the rim of the egg shelf. Jizara looked up at her, stupidly, not even recognizing her. Sister!
Scrring came the sound like an arrow in her ear. She saw blades flash silver in the lichen-light as they were drawn.
Auron drove his crest into her side, and the tenuous connection vanished. Wistala, up and away! came Mother’s last frantic thought, and with it a horrible, clawing fear that blinded and deafened. Wistala fled upward.
Ku! Ku! Kuuuuuu! came the war cries from below. The sound traveled through rock and ice.
Dead lichen, ice, and loose rock gave way, dropping onto Auron, who was following below. Vague flashes came through—Blood—spears—Wheel of Fire Drakossozh—Yellhounds! Jizara!
Death cries and madness pursued her up the shaft. Up she climbed, up until there were no more sounds echoing from below, up until sii and saa both burned and quivered and the hatchlings had to cling to each other with tail and mouth, up until blood-taste coated their tongues with each breath and the hammering in their neck hearts made their ears ache. Wistala pushed through bone and dead dry pine needles in utter darkness, no longer climbing but not walking either. The darkness unnerved her. Not even dragon eyes could pick out detail, and at every moment she feared the terrible sound of blades being drawn.
She fetched up against something cold and wet—an ice flow blocked the tunnel. She could still feel air moving from a crack at the top, a crack that could hardly fit her snout. What little remained of her ebbing strength vanished.
“Auron, we’re trapped,” she said, hardly able to get the words out. A last hope flickered: perhaps the dwarves and that tall wing-helmed man had been defeated. “We have to go back down. Perhaps Mother and Jizara—”
“No,” Auron said. Dully, she observed that he was hardly panting, though he moved stiffly. Of course, he was lighter, being scaleless. Auron sniffed at the clean, cold air coming in over the ice flow. “Fresh air. We’re almost there.”
“That’s why you don’t want to go back. Your thin hide—”
Auron shoved her aside. Her brother simply went mad. There was no other word for it. He began to pound the ice with his tail. Pieces, tiny pieces of ice compared to the mass, flaked off and slid down to the bones at the bottom of the tunnel. She wondered if this was the raging fighting fury that Mother said took over young drakes. He bit and clawed at the ice whenever he shifted position.
When his tail began to spray blood at each swipe, he spat at the ice. The spittle hissed as it struck, and it ran into fractures, raising a sharp odor of bat urine.
“Wistala, spit!”
“I’ve no fire yet—”
Excrement and excuses. It is melting the ice, she realized. She tried to squeeze her fire bladder behind her breastbone. Nothing.
“Spit, Wistala!”
“Can’t!”
Then she could see. A faint pink light came through the ice flow. It must be the light of the Upper World, the sun.
Two cracks ran up the ice flow, parallel and in a shape oddly reminiscent of the man with the spear’s winged helm. She pictured the helm at the base of the cracks—Something spasmed behind her breastbone, and she found she could spit. Found she could—she had no choice. Her tongue pressed itself against the roof of her mouth, and her jaw opened wide—
Out it came, until she felt as though her vertebrae from shoulder-pivot to tail-tip might be running up her neck and out her mouth. An orangish light filled the cave along with the acid smell, stronger than ever.
She collapsed, spent in an entirely new way.
Auron gathered himself, curled tight, and exploded toward the orange glow like a projectile from one of the dwarves’ war machines.
He broke through in a shower of yellow-white shards—
And disappeared straight over a ledge.
Wistala struck out from her shoulders, extended her neck even as his tail-tip whipped for a hold. She sank her teeth into it, tasted her brother’s blood in her mouth. His momentum dragged her forward, toward the ledge. Impossible distances stretched off in every direction, out, to either side.
Especially down. Her head went over.
A drop, a thousand times greater than that of the egg shelf, lay beneath. The vast distance seemed to reach up and touch her between the eyes. Her head swam. . . .
Her teeth, however, gripped all the tighter as her short legs found purchase. She arched her thick back, claws dug into ice, rock, and hardened snow, setting every haunch against her brother’s weight.
Auron found a grip, and his weight vanished. She didn’t release his tail, though, until he rolled beside her on the ledge.
The two hatchlings shivered against each other, panting in the thin air of the Upper World.