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.