Dragon Strike (Age of Fire #4)
BOOK ONE
Adapt
GRANT A FAVOR TO ONE GENERATION OF HOMINIDS, AND YOU’LL FIND
THEIR SONS TWICE AS DEMANDING—AND THRICE AS FORGETFUL.
—AuRel the Bronze
Chapter 1
AuRon son of AuRel, the scaleless dragon who lived upon the Isle of Ice, watched his sons blink in the brassy sun of the dazzling northern spring.
In the winter, AuRon had learned, the island saw constant snow, coming in waves from low iron clouds. Summers were alternately foggy and rainy, save for a brief, enchanted dry spell after midsummer. But the turning seasons, spring and fall, slow getting started but always lingering thanks to the warm ocean currents, made up for the rest.
As though in apology, spring had brought wildflowers to the thin patches of soil clinging between granite spurs where the wind died. Their yellow and blue and white heads looked up, as bright as sun, sea, and sky. Incredibly, insects already danced and buzzed between the blooms, keeping low, out of the wind, where the sky heated black earth and turned melt into mire.
AuRon looked at his sons, pride making the armored fans covering his neck hearts twitch. In a few months they would breathe their first fire and become drakes. Ausurath, a little heavier than his brother, had big back haunches on his red-scaled body and was a fine jumper, forever pouncing on his brother. Aumoahk had an odd, overlarge slit of a right nostril that showed dark against his golden scale, a reminder of a bloody brawl with his brother.
On their first trip into the Upper World he taught them about wind and shadow and the course of the sun. The second time his mate, Natasatch, accompanied them with the two sisters. Both glittered as green as their mother—of their five eggs AuRon and Natasatch had four hatchlings; one, sadly, never emitted so much as a flutter of a heartbeat and became unwholesome. Natasatch solemnly burned it as the others began to tap.
The excitement of the trips aboveground cut down on the fighting between the males. Traditionally males fought to the death upon emerging from the eggs, driven by mad instinct, but the two adults together managed to keep throats and limbs intact.
Once they could be made to understand that the survival of all might depend on an extra set of ears and nostrils, they settled into almost playful enmity. Underground the two males wrestled and bit and yeeked little battle roars at each other, stealing each other’s fish and mutton through diversions worthy of their army-smashing great-grandsire, scattering their sisters to corners of the cave, then collapsing into sleep with tiny teeth locked on each other’s limbs. More than once the family gathered for a meal with the smell of the bleeding brothers in the air; then it was time for wound licking and lectures.
Aboveground, in the overwhelming space of the Upper World, AuRon was relieved to see that they shrank against each other, tail to tail and staring from heads frozen in fear.
The awe soon faded. The male hatchlings, with the energy and curiosity of their age, lost their fear of the open sky and distant horizions. But for AuRon the trouble had only begun. Their sire had to do a good deal of wrangling to keep them close as he tried to teach them of game trails, grazing, water, and spoor. But their attention was difficult to hold with big snowfoot hares bounding away at their approach, all bouncing hindquarters and flapping ears.
Gently grabbing one scrambling set of shoulder blades with his teeth-covered lips, then prodding the other back in line with his stiff, regrown tail, AuRon envied his mate. The females kept tight to their mother’s belly and listened attentively. When they acted, they cooperated. His sons dragon-dashed after every bee and showed all the sense of a field mouse.
On the third trip, AuRon decided it was time for them to learn a real lesson.
This time he went up first to check Zan the tradesdwarf’s work before loosing the hatchlings on the world. The Chartered Company line-trader, a grizzled old northerner who might be mistaken for a hairy stump, was on his way north for a season’s trapping and skinning. He had chuckled when AuRon described what he wanted to fashion, and he’d done a typically thorough dwarf’s job in exchange for a bag full of dragonscales sloughed off Natasatch over the winter.
“Rafer be hunting beasts with mother and sisters,” Ausurath complained.
“Watch your brother’s approach. See, he’s keeping downwind from the camp.” AuRon had to stifle a prrum as he watched.
Aumoahk tested the air around the “camp.” His slit nostril seemed to wink at AuRon as he breathed.
AuRon watched his son sniff and listen before exposing himself and then zigzagging up to the camp. Aumoahk’s scale would gleam better if he’d eat the bits of scrap brought by the tradesdwarf with the same enthusiasm that he swallowed the few coins of AuRon’s bare hoard, but he was cannier than his more enthusiastic brother.
Aumoahk found the three dummies lying in their circle around the stones of a nonexistent campfire, oars serving as spears resting over “shoulders” of burned man-furniture and rotting fishnet. Aumoahk became overexcited and squeaked out his little roar and charged the nearest.
A thunderous barking broke out from the rocks above the “camp.”
AuRon spread his wings and glided down to the camp, where Aumoahk was play-fighting with the wolf. The wolf, a grandson of his old friend Blackhard named Birchfang, and his sleek mate dashed in and danced out, nipping at the new drake’s flanks, first one dealing with the more dangerous front end, then the other.
The drake vented his frustration and his fireless bladder on some innocent bracken. The air turned sour and sulfurous.
“You missed the sentry,” AuRon said, landing and pointing clumsily with his tail. Its small size and the off-putting step down in flesh from old stump to new tail struck him as ugly, but Natasatch didn’t seem to mind.
Wolf eyes and ears poked around a sharp piece of blue shale.
“What did I tell you about your flame? You’ll be hungry tonight with an empty firebladder, and all the hungrier when you get none of whatever your sisters bring back.”
“You thsaid they’d be wulnerable when on the ground asleep,” the drake said, glaring at the wolves.
“I told you they might have dogs,” AuRon said. “Men, well, they might as well be those bundles for all they use their noses and ears. That’s why they travel with dogs. Dogs that come out of the soundest sleep at the whiff of a dragon.”
“Wolves aren’t dogs,” Aumoahk complained. “No fairz using wolves.”
“No, wolves are smarter, as they don’t have men to do all their thinking for them. If you can creep up on a wolf, no dog will ever give you trouble.”
A cry carried across the valley. Strange to hear a wolf-howl in the bright morning sunshine. Ausurath took the cry as his cue to jump on one of the scarecrows. He kicked a bottomless bucket serving for a head down the hillside.
AuRon cocked an ear, reminding himself to send Ausurath off to retrieve the bucket.
“News, news, hear me, O Good Woooooooooolves!” he heard.
“The blighters are probably fighting again,” AuRon said. “Every cairn-building starts a feud.”
He glanced up the hillside, where Natasatch was watching Istach and Varatheela stalk some goats. Varatheela’s tail quivered just like his sister Wistala’s on the hunt. Istach tended to be quiet and reserved, perhaps because of the odd dark stripes on her green scale. The males were forever quoting some bit of hatchling rhyme they overheard their mother say when the parents thought their hatchlings asleep.
She born with stripes looks to a bitter fate,
As many suitors as stripes, but never to mate.
Istach gave as good as she got. She liked to weave the scales on her brothers’ tails as they slept, so when they twitched to wakefulness each yelped as the scales pinched or tore free.
He sighed. Of the six dragons of his family, he was the only survivor. Unless his brother, maimed in the hatching duel, still lived. Not that he deserved his heartsbeat. He’d betrayed the rest of them to the dwarves.
Oh, Tala. It’s a hard world—for both dragons and goats.
Natasatch raised her head as well. She’d picked up enough wolf-speech to understand an alarm.
“O good woooooooolves! Strangers on the island, trail and spoor on morning-side downwind, to the burned clear and fjord-caves. Pass this news to Firelong, O Good Wooooooooooolves!”
Birchfang hopped up on a smooth-topped rock that reminded AuRon of a sea turtle he’d once met and began to pass the news.
“Don’t bother with that,” AuRon said. “I heard. Thank your pack, friend. I’ll fly north to Grass Point and bring back a moose for you first chance I get.”
Birchfang’s mate looked at her husband, pride shining in her eyes. Though they were both young, they’d already founded their own pack. The freshly named Mist Hunters had a range nearly as great as the whole woodlands of their birth. Here there were no men to catch wolves in cruel traps and nail their pelts to barn doors and fenceposts.