“Is this really the Great Temple of the First Mother?” He craned his neck around, looking at the carvings.
“Yes,” I said, then made a little shooing gesture. “But hurry and bring more people, Feniul dear. There’s no time for history lessons now. ”
“Oh, yes, yes!” He took off again, and almost collided with another dragon coming in.
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It was Niva, draped with terrified humans. Luka and I helped them dismount, and she took off again. Soon there was a steady stream of dragons coming and going, leaving shaken and wide- eyed villagers in the temple they had always been forbidden to enter.
A few of the villagers dared to approach the ring, fascinated by the eggs within, but Luka and I stepped between them and the eggs, and they backed off. From their amazement, I understood that Velika’s eggs were twice the size of any dragon eggs they had ever seen, and there were nearly twice as many in the clutch as had been laid within their memory. None of this surprised us, of course.
The dragon I had once served—Rannym—came in and dropped Ullalal and her daughters practically on top of me. He looked rather frantic now, and took off before their feet touched the ground. They were smoke- stained, and one of the daughters had a burn on her arm covered by a makeshift bandage.
More and more people were arriving with injuries, and many of them were weeping in a way that told me they had lost someone they loved to the fire or the lava. I started to pace around the eggs, itching to help but knowing there was nothing I could do. I had no experience with caring for burns, and some of the people were afraid of me.
Luka, who had what he called “field training,” managed to convince a few people that he meant them no harm. While Ullalal washed burns, he bandaged them under her supervision.
And I paced around the eggs.
“Well, you’re a lot of help, wearing a hole in the floor that way. ” Hagen came up behind me and gave me a rough slap on the back.
“Hagen!” I threw my arms around him and squeezed. “Where have you been?”
“Helping me,” Leontes rumbled. “We have burn medicine here,” he said loudly, in the dragon tongue.
At once Ullalal and several others went to him. Hagen pulled a basket from Leontes’s back and began to hand out pots of something green and sticky.
After all of the pots but one had been distributed, Hagen took one and beckoned a couple of children over, smiling to put them at ease. They came, reluctantly, and showed him their burned fingers. Hagen began to rub the sticky stuff on them.
“When we saw the fires starting, Leontes and I did a quick run for some alo-alo plant he saw when we first arrived,” he said cheerfully, as though he rubbed burn salve on strange, half-naked children every day. “We had to crush the plants in these pots before we could bring them—the salve has to set for an hour or so before you use it. ”
“I’m just glad that you’re safe,” I told him, and gave him another hug.
“Yes, yes. ” He patted my shoulder absently. “I wasn’t worried about you,” he went on, gesturing to another group of children. “After everything you’ve done in the last three years, I figured that a volcano would hardly catch your attention!”
I swatted him.
A Day and a Night and a Day
As the fires and lava flows continued, though, all laughter and jesting ceased. The last humans brought in were coughing from smoke inhalation or were burned so badly that I found it impossible to control my expression when I saw their wounds, and had to turn away for a moment.
After a time, even the dragons didn’t dare to look for more survivors. For although their scales were impervious to the heat from forest fires, the lava could still burn them, and the smoke choke them as well.
Shardas and Velika, who had both suffered terrible burns in the First Dragon War, felt the heat from the volcano more keenly than the others. They said nothing, but I could see the stiffness in their movements. And I could see the memories in their eyes, of pain and darkness and fighting to stay alive. The memories were worse than the heat and the smoke, I felt sure.
Now that Velika was back with her eggs, I could help a little more with the people, though they still looked at me askance. To my surprise, it was Ullalal who made me feel the most welcome. She appeared grateful for the help, and respectful of my closeness with the king and queen.
Together, she and I organized what supplies there were, distributed blankets, food, and water, and fetched Leontes when we found someone too badly injured for just a little salve to mend. With humans worth little more than chattel here, nothing approaching a human physician could be found, but Ullalal, with her knowledge of herbs, was the closest they had. She was not quite a physician, nor truly an alchemist.
“But she is willing to learn and has some knowledge of her own,” Leontes said. “That will have to do. ”
Hagen helped, too, and one look at the vibrancy in his expression and movements made me realize that this, perhaps, was where my brother truly belonged.
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During the long wait that followed, I took Leontes aside to tell him so.
“As the oldest living person in my family,” I began, not sure how to phrase this. “Well, I do have an aunt and uncle, but they’re not here. And also, well . . . ”
“I am aware of the part your aunt played in your meeting Theoradus,” Leontes said tactfully.
“Yes, indeed. ” I brushed futilely at my trousers, but they would have to be thrown away when this was over. If I ever got out of this temple. Off this continent. “I would like to offer my brother, Hagen, to you as an apprentice,” I said finally.
“I am delighted to accept his services,” Leontes said. “And I see no need for an apprentice fee, as there is nothing to purchase in the Far Isles. ” He chuckled. “But shall we say that he must serve under my tutelage for three years? At which time, I shall assess his knowledge and determine if he has mastered the arts sufficiently to set up his own laboratory. ”
“That sounds excellent. ” But I frowned. “We really should compensate you,” I said. “We shall have to have a cousin take care of Theoradus’s museum, and also Hagen’s orchards. Perhaps a percentage of the orchard’s earnings, in the form of seeds or dry goods, could be brought to the Far Isles?”
“An excellent plan,” said Leontes. “Ten percent of the orchard’s earnings, for three years?”
“Very good. ” We bowed to each other and then he flew me down to the ring where we had set up camp.
Our camp was quite a strange sight: in the ring, which was the exact middle of the temple, the clutch of eggs was watched over by two enormous dragons. Around them were more dragons, huge and brightly colored, with Hagen, Luka, and me walking freely among them. In the far corners of the main floor, and throughout the temple, were the other dragons: small, dull colored, and with their eyes always upon Velika and her eggs. Their humans, some thousand people, huddled together by village. They did not address any dragon without being spoken to first; they did not make eye contact with a dragon at any time. It was heartbreaking to see how spiritless they were.
When Leontes and I arrived back at the ring to bring Hagen the news of his apprenticeship, the calls of congratulation from our dragon friends and the bashful way that Hagen hugged me and then Leontes caused a great many stares and so much muttering that it almost approached a roar.
“What is all this?” Mannyl had withdrawn into himself during the crisis, and had not spoken for more than a day. “What are you going on about?” The Elder One sniffed the air. “Tell me!”
“Leontes, who is an alchemist, has just agreed to take my brother, Hagen, as an apprentice,” I said boldly, and Amacarin translated for me.
“A human, apprenticing to a dragon?” He spluttered incoherently for several minutes. “In alchemy?” The spluttering turned to coughs. “I will not have it! I will not have it!”
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“But I will,” Velika said firmly. “It is precisely what this world needs: humans and dragons working side by side. Not against each other, not keeping one another as slaves. Together. ”
“Never!” Mannyl’s scream made me touch my ears to see if they were bleeding, and I saw that Luka had just done the same. “Never!”
But the screams took too much out of him, and he collapsed, panting, and said nothing more.
During the night Darrym began to keen, and we lit torches to see what the problem was.
The Elder One had passed away.
By the light of the pink torches, we all bowed our heads and sang the song of dragon mourning. I knew it all too well, although as a human I couldn’t sing it properly, but I was surprised to find that all the local humans knew it, too. It seemed that mourning dragons was not forbidden to them. We stood, those of us who could, and sang until well after sunlight had trickled through the entrance. We rested briefly, and ate what little food there was, and then began again. A full dragon funeral would stretch for days, but these were only the songs that must be sung before a body was laid on its pyre.
And before that could be done, we would have to venture outside the temple, Velika declared. We needed food, and it was time to see what was left in the aftermath of the eruption.
Once the second mourning song was done, Luka, Hagen, and I all rode on Shardas as he burst out into the dim sunlight and surveyed the scene below.
What had been spared by the volcano?
Very, very little.
Glassy Shore, Steaming Sea
It’s like . . . like . . . ” Words failed me, and I closed my mouth with a click of teeth. Perched on Shardas’s back, I reached forward and put my arms around Luka, feeling my brother’s hand on my shoulder from behind.
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The forest was gone.
As far as we could see there was nothing but a vast ocean of steaming black rock. The mountains that rose out of the rocky plain were barren, their trees turned to ash. There was a river cutting through the plain, but its flow was sluggish and it was choked with ash and debris. Thick clouds of smoke still filled the sky, making it hard to breathe.
“It’s all been destroyed,” Luka said. “Their whole country. ”
“Yes,” Shardas said gravely. “They will need to find a new home. ” He sighed heavily. “With us, I am sure. ”
“So you’ll take them all to the Far Isles?” I found my voice at last. “The humans, too?”
“We have no other choice,” he replied.
It was true. It would be murder to leave anyone, human or dragon, in this place. There was no food, no clean water, as far as I could see.
“Well, there’re fish,” Hagen pointed out. “I mean, for us to eat right now,” he amended as we all looked at him. “Of course you can’t leave anyone here. ”
“I wonder how far the flow went into the ocean,” Luka said. Looking north, we could see only more clouds.
“Let’s find out,” Shardas said.
He spread his wings and leaped into the air, gliding over the ripples and mounds of hardening lava. Here and there a streak of glowing orange showed where the molten rock still had not cooled completely.
While the endless fields of black rock that had once been forest were depressing, the shore was now rather breathtaking. Steam rose in clouds where the hot rock touched the water, but the sand of the shore had been fused into a glistening ribbon of greenish black glass.
Shardas hovered over it, poking with his claws and probing with his tail to see if he could land there.
“It’s cool enough,” he reported. “But too slick to provide any footing. ” He settled into the water instead, heaving a sigh as he did so. “Warm,” he said, his eyes half- closed.
The steam was quite pleasant, though it made the hair that had escaped my braids stick to my face. It felt cleaner to breathe, certainly. Hagen slid down Shardas’s back to his rump, and looked into the clear water as best he could.
“I think the fish might have been scared away,” he reported.
“You are no doubt right,” Shardas said. “Grab hold. ”
Hagen scrambled back to put his hands on my waist, I put mine on Luka’s, and Luka gripped the ridge in front of him as tightly as he could. Shardas sank down until our boots were wet, then hit the bottom with all four feet and surged upward.
Streaming water, he skimmed the waves and circled around to the islet where we had first set up our camp. There was little there now: some spare ropes and baskets that had carried supplies, a fishing net or two laid out to dry. Shardas scooped one of these up in his foreclaws, and dragged it through the water a few times.
Nothing.
“The fish have either been frightened away, or were poisoned by the gases in the lava,” he declared. “We’re going to have to get far from here, soon, in order to find food. ”
We soared further over the ocean, to places where we had found fish before, and dragged the net through the water again and again. Not a single fish turned up, and we saw no sign of anything else—none of the strange, flat, diamond-shaped fish the Citatians called rai’as, no porpoises or even seabirds. We were the only living things for miles.
Gathering up the net, Shardas flew us back to the temple. Humans and dragons had gathered at the entrance, and some had even ventured down the side of the mountain. The elegant carvings were smoke-blackened, but otherwise undamaged, I was pleased to see.
What I was not pleased to see was Darrym, standing in the center of the entrance, roaring displeasure at Ullalal.
“She’s not even his person,” I hissed to Luka.
“Hush,” Hagen said. “What is he saying?”
“None shall leave! None shall leave this place!” Darrym flamed into the air to make his point.
Some of the humans who had been climbing around the entrance started, and crept back inside the darkened temple. Amacarin, who was crouched on a ledge at the top of the entrance, leaped back and nearly lost his footing.
“I say, watch how you go there!”
Darrym’s neck twisted, snakelike, as he looked up at Amacarin. “You are free to go at any time, of course,” he said silkily. He turned his head and looked straight at Shardas. “Any of you. Any time. ”
“We will all be leaving soon,” Shardas said, hovering just outside the entrance. “The lava traveled all the way to the ocean; there are no more fish, no plants or animals. You will need to come with us to the Far Isles, lest you starve. ”
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A shout, to everyone’s surprise, came from Ullalal.
She stood below Shardas, shaking her head vehemently. With a long finger she pointed to the south.
“No, there is nothing there,” Darrym told her, but there was a strange edge to his voice.
Ullalal let loose with a string of words in her own language, all the while pointing to the south.
“Get back in the temple,” Darrym snarled when she was through.
“Amacarin,” Shardas said before Ullalal could respond, “take her south and see what the terrain is like there. ”
“At once. ” The blue-gray dragon dropped down from his perch and settled beside Ullalal. He extended one foreclaw to help her mount, and she stared at him. “You may ride on my back,” he told her kindly.
Gingerly, she clambered over his shoulder and settled just in front of his wings. He took off smoothly, keeping her balanced as best he could. Such solicitous behavior from Amacarin was still new to me, and I marveled afresh at the civilizing influence Gala had had on him.
But my attention was dragged away once again by Darrym. He was breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows, and smoke came out of his nostrils. “You. Have. No. Right. ”
“I have every right,” Shardas said, his voice like a blade.
“Not for long,” Darrym said, and more smoke escap
ed from his mouth with the words.
“What is that?” Now Shardas’s chest expanded, and we all gripped tight. Luka turned his face toward me, bracing for the wash of heat that would come if Shardas let loose his flame. “Do you threaten me?”
“No,” Darrym said. “I challenge you. ”
Duel
Darrym has lost his mind,” Hagen said with authority. “Shardas is twice his size, at the very least. ”
We were in the ring on the floor of the temple once more, telling Velika what was happening.
“And Shardas has already won a challenge against a much larger dragon,” Luka added. “More than once, in fact. ”
I winced, thinking of those challenges. Shardas’s own brother, Krashath, had objected to his kingship. In their first fight, long before my great-great-great-grandmother’s time, Krashath had been wounded and presumed dead. When he returned, just last year, Shardas had defeated him once and for all.
That fight had been a horrible thing to see, and as much as I loathed Darrym, I wasn’t looking forward to seeing it repeated. The smaller dragon was vastly outmatched: it would be a slaughter.
I fussed with the blanket that covered one of the eggs, waiting for Velika to speak up, to stop the fight. But she didn’t. I finally looked at her, and saw that she was gazing at the carving on the wall just outside the ring.
“We knew we would have to fight,” she said softly. “To make our point, to get our eggs out of here. I just never thought it would be a duel, and not with someone we had once considered a friend. ”
“You don’t really mean to let them do this?” I gave her a pleading look.
“Creel, we have no choice,” Velika said. “We all wanted this to end without a conflict, and it will. It just won’t end without bloodshed. ”
She had a point. And, moreover, if Shardas had to fight anyone, I preferred it to be Darrym over anyone else. He was a traitor, after all, and I could not believe that I, too, had once considered him a friend.
“Shardas! I am ready!”
We could see Darrym framed in the entrance of the temple. With the sun behind him, it was hard to make out his features, but he seemed to have grown several large spinal ridges quite suddenly.
“What are those?” Luka squinted at the dragon.
“Spears,” Shardas said, his voice flat.