Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) (26 page)

“Ha!” he cr
ied. “I have my Dragon at last. How does it feel, beast?”

“GLORY TO SYLAKIA!” shouted his men.

Yolathion stalked down to take an arrogant stance beside her head. “I have your Rider, beast. Surrender, and I will make your death a merciful one.”

Aranya touched her tongue to the blood on her lips. She was tired, so tired of fighting. For a moment she simply lay there, breathing, her eyes closed and her lungs labouring against the agony of every breath in her abused t
hroat. She knew her injuries were severe. Golden Dragon blood leaked out of dozens of wounds on her body. Aranya wanted nothing more than to lie down and die, for the hunter had won.

But she was a Dragon. She was the
Princess of Immadia. And this man had tried to kill her before, and failed. She would not give up.

Aranya whispered, “Yolathion.”

He jumped back a foot. “The beast speaks!”

“
Why do you wish to kill me?”

He drew himself up, his face
set like stone and his voice stern. “Because you have brought shame to my command, Dragon. You destroyed many brave Sylakian warriors with your treachery. No Islander is safe. You’ve been set against me from the first. I vowed to destroy you, and so I shall. I’ll have your hide, Dragon.”

“But it was Sylakia’s hammer that first struck me,” Aranya returned. Breath hissed into her lungs, renewing her; but
she was unable to heal the pain of her failure to keep Zuziana safe. “Your hand, Yolathion, held that hammer. Yet I held your life in my hand and let you live.”

“When did you hold my life in your paw, beast?”

His scorn returned the fire to her belly. “On Remoy, when I placed a scroll upon your pillow-roll.
Remember Jeradia
, it said.”

The warrior gaped at her. “That was you?
How? Impossible! You lie, beast.”

“I know your disgrace, Jeradian,” said Aranya. “I know how you flung Immadia to her death, knowing she had saved your father. Now you will face dishonour twice over, for I will never surrender to you as long as I have breath to draw into my lungs.”

Yolathion raised his hammer, his face a mask of wrath. “I’ll strike you down where you lie, beast! How dare you lecture a Jeradian warrior about honour?”

Slowly
, Aranya gathered her paws beneath her, even though Yolathion bellowed at her to lie still. She forced herself to stand. She gazed at him, long and deep, sorrowing, a gaze that stopped his hammer above his head. It could have been so different. But he was bent on serving Sylakia. He meant to kill her–again. He had hunted her with every fibre of his being. He hated her. He had driven his men to their deaths in order to bring her down, and the Princess of Remoy with her.

Aranya said,
“If you have any regard left for the Princess of Immadia in that black heart of yours, Yolathion, then I beg you to treat my Rider with honour. Take care of her, please. I
beg
you.”

Anger and puzzlement warred in Yolathion’s expression as he stared at Aranya. “Do I … know you?”

“You do.”

Aranya transformed.

Abruptly, the net sagged. Two hooks snagged painfully in her skin, one behind her shoulder blade and another in her left buttock. She tore them loose; seeing in the fiery pain a punishment for her failure. She let the ropes drop around her ankles. The holes in the net were made with a Dragon in mind, not a Human.

She said, “I am Aranya
, Princess of Immadia. Perhaps you know me better thus.”

Yolathion wheezed, “Aranya!”

She must look a sight, Aranya realised. She was covered in blood, wounded in more places than she could count. Her right wrist hung askew in an exact replica of what the Sylakian warriors had done to her wing-joint.

The young Third War-Hammer gazed at her with the air of a man who had just had the living pith kicked out of him, Aranya thought. He glanced at the limp net, probably wondering where in the Island-World his captive
Amethyst Dragon had vanished. He looked at her as though he had seen her clamber out of the grave–which she had, in a sense. He regarded her as a man desires a woman, even though she was in a pitiful condition. A softness and horrified regret entered his eyes. Aranya raised her chin, and stood tall and proud.

But the world spun around her, full of strange colours. Her strength was spent.

“Aranya,” he repeated. “How?”

She took a
backward step. “I’m a Dragon Shapeshifter, Yolathion. We’re hard to kill. Please, take care of Zuziana. Promise me.”

“Aranya, stop!”

She almost did stop; the craving to yield to this man was so sweet. She almost listened to him, turned, and flung herself into his arms as she had wished to from the very first time she saw him. But her feet took another step, and another. The soldiers’ leers from behind his shoulder strengthened her. The ones who had smashed her wing helped firm her resolve.

“Farewell, Yolathion.”

“Aranya, I–”

She whirled, and flung herself
in a graceful dive off the Sylakian Dragonship’s platform.

F
or the second
time in her life, the Princess of Immadia fell toward the Cloudlands, her body spinning end over end in a ghastly parody of flight that could only end in death. She fell past the unsuspecting Dragonships of Yolathion’s command. She fell faster than the golden rays of dawn sweeping down the brief crags of Tyrodia Island. She fell into clear air that grew thicker and warmer the closer she came to the Cloudlands.

She had a moment to think of what Yolathion might have said up there. I hate you? I love you? Go
toss yourself into the nearest Cloudlands volcano, you evil, shape-changing enchantress?

But Tyrodia was not a tall Island.

The transformation took longer than usual. It felt torn out of her, a step beyond what her strength could bear. Drawing the deepest breath she had ever taken into her lungs, Dragon-Aranya plunged into the clouds.

She pulled out of her dive carefully, careful not to repeat her
ligament-tearing first flight’s mistake. Aranya flew by instinct beneath the toxic clouds for as long as her breath could hold out–which, for a Dragon, was a good quarter of an hour if she did not flap hard. In her condition, she managed about half that time, but it was enough to take her a good long way from the pursuing Dragonships. Her right wing dangled at the last wing-joint. Every stroke of her wings grated the broken bones together.

Aranya
flew long enough in the grey world beneath the Cloudlands to appreciate what might happen if she flew into an unseen spire of rock. That would be a relief from the white-hot pain of her broken joint. Strangely, the pain did not dull her senses. It gave her purpose. It made her focus, purifying the extraneous as a meriatite furnace burns off the slag to produce pure, refined meriatite for the acid bath. She flapped through the thick, liquid-seeming air, a slow-motion flying as if she were underwater.

Zuziana! She mourned the loss of her Rider. This was the only way to escape Yolathion. But she could not do it with a Rider. Perhaps their physician could help Zip
, where she had been unable to. She remembered reading about the ravages of disease when she was younger; she feared that Zuziana was close to death.

Leaving her felt like death.

Aranya wanted to believe that she could steal Zuziana a second time from the Sylakians. That she must leave her friend with a man like Yolathion burned her to the core. His duty would be to return her to Sylakia Town for her execution–and he had shown himself to be a perfect slave to duty. It was all she could do to keep flying. A Dragon could do nothing for her Rider if she was incapable of flying. She already had a glued-together wing. Now she looked like she had scabies, there were so many wounds on her body.

Nak and Oyda would know what to do, wouldn’t they?

Aranya leaped out of the Cloudlands like a trout leaping upriver, and descended again. Please let the Sylakians be looking elsewhere. Please let them be struck blind.

After two
hours of flying northwest from Tyrodia Island, groaning and writhing and wondering if every wing beat would be her last, Aranya overtook a trader’s Dragonship headed for Sylakia. It was the first Dragonship she had seen in what seemed like months which was not swarming with Sylakian troops. This, at last, was a stroke of good fortune. She hunted the trader with cunning, landed lightly atop its hydrogen sack and hitched a ride.

She curled up and slept, numb to the world.

Aranya awoke above the deserts of eastern Sylakia. The night was young, with Iridith lording its sallow presence in the sky and a full Jade moon passing overhead, too. She worked on the worst of her wounds with her magic. There was a piece of crossbow quarrel stuck in her leg. The bleeding cuts and puncture wounds received most of her attention. But she quickly realised that her wounded wing joint needed to be set properly before she should try to heal it. She sensed there were several broken pieces inside.

The trader’s Dragonship provided fine transportation all the way up to the mountains of mid-Sylakia, where the Dragonship turned more to the north to skirt the mountains, while her path lay directly westward. Aranya intrepidly winged off.

That was a bad mistake. She found herself barely able to stay two hours in the air because of the pain in her wing, thus she entered the mountains during the daylight hours, only to be attacked by an iceroc. Aranya eventually defeated the bird, but left a number of her scales in the mountains. She waited for nightfall before taking off in intense pain and continuing her journey. Even her healing power barely dulled the pain.

The mountain crossing took far long
er than she remembered. By morning, Aranya had battled over the mountains and was free to coast down the other side. This involved a dint of swift flying to outpace an enraged family of icerocs she scared up from their massive stick nests amidst the ever-icy peaks. Her broken wing flopped about agonisingly with every buffet of the wind. She cooled it in the high-lying snows, and later in the ribbon of lake which curved to the western periphery of the isle. When she could no longer fly, she walked. After endless hours of walking on the barren southern shore, she surprised an injured windroc aground and tore into it with a madness of hunger. After that Aranya summoned the strength to fly a little more, although it took all of her courage.

She crossed at the end of the lake, and
her legs collapsed.

No. She had to push on. Any marauding Dragonship might happen upon her. The Sylakians would soon be searching for her again.

Aranya limped along on broken-toed, bleeding paws. She pushed through thick forests, seeking that tiny dell above the precipice, the dell with the hut, the hut with the two old people in it. She dreamed she heard Oyda calling to her. She dreamed of flying over the Cloudlands, but somewhere Nak shouted at her not to crawl on her belly like a worm. That was what she was reduced to, now. A belly-crawling Dragon, a Dragon who had almost crawled before the boots of the Sylakian conqueror and surrendered meekly to his mastery.
Never!
She cried in in the depths of her hearts.
Never!
She used her anger as a whip to push herself on.

She transformed herself. Even one-handed, the injured
wrist tucked up against her body, crawling on bleeding knees, it was easier to move a small Human body than to drag a Dragon’s bulk through the forest.

During
the darkest hour after moons-set, Aranya reached the dell. All was quiet.

She dragged herself through the streamlet and up to the front door of the hut. Her fist fell upon it, twi
ce. She heard a shuffle within. Lamplight struck her face.

“Petal? I
s that … oh, petal.” Oyda made a sound like a choked-off sob. “You poor girl … Nak! Nak, wake up, thou fool husband. Aranya has come home.”

Aranya leaned into Oyda’s arms and
sobbed out her brokenness.

* * * *

Two days passed in fever-dreams. Aranya remembered little save Oyda’s gentle hands cleaning and treating her wounds, and holding her head as she spooned a thick vegetable broth down her throat. She recalled a cheerful fire blazing behind the grating, seen through the door into the hut’s kitchen-come-living-area. The mighty Black Dragon’s head appeared in those leaping flames, speaking to her. She raved, she cried, she sobbed brokenly over Zuziana’s fate and raged at Oyda to let her go and save her. She longed to fling herself into the abyss, never to fly again.

She told the old people everything which had passed, as though she wished to purge her soul
of a well of bitterness. The worst was how they neither judged nor blamed her. Nak and Oyda had never been gentler or more accepting, despite her miserable catalogue of failures.

That evening, as she lay on a couch Nak had drawn close to the fireplace for her, staring
despondently into the flames, she startled at a firm rap on the door.

Oyda laid d
own her rolling pin. “Nak, we’ve a visitor.”

She said it as though she expected
this person; there was neither surprise in her voice, nor any sign of the panic that welled in Aranya’s breast.

Kindly, Oyda added, “Be still, petal. What will be, will be.”

Aranya gasped as a huge rajal of a man filled the doorway. Yolathion! The very last person she would have expected. He bent beneath the lintel; he could not stand upright within the hut. His face was grave. In his arms he bore a bundle, the tiny body of Zuziana of Remoy.

“You must be Oyda,” said a deep, familiar voice, which set every nerve in Aranya’s body alight. “Is Aranya here? Is she?”

His gaze swept the hut. When he saw Aranya, huddled in the couch, a smile touched his lips at last. She trembled, but returned his gaze levelly, refusing to welcome him.

“There’s but one Dragonship out there,” Nak called, “and she’s flying flags both white and green. What does this mean, Oyda? Aranya? Do you know this Sylakian officer?”

It took Aranya three tries to persuade a coherent word to emerge from her throat. Green and white. Surrender and friendship. What did this signify? If Yolathion had brought the Princess back to her, then he was committing treason against Sylakia. Where was the rest of his command? How had he found this place? Why had he come?

“Nak, Oyda, may I introduce Yolathion of Jeradia?” she managed at last. “Yolathion is a Third War-Hammer in the Sylakian army; the man charged with hunting me. He threw me off the Last Walk.
Now, he will wreak his revenge.”

Yolathion stiffened at her words. But his dark eyes did not flash; instead, he nodded, seeming to accept her accusation
s. He said, “I tried to care for your Rider, Dragon. But I failed. She lies near death. This disease is called the Green Death; there is no proof against it. I brought her to you, that you might by some means try to heal her. When she spoke of this place, she also spoke of Dragon tears.”

“Dragons don’t cry, pup,” said Nak, stumping forward on his canes. “Don’t
ye know nothing, thou wicked rajal of a man? How dare thee deal with Immadia so treacherously, thou shameful son of dishonour?”

“My presence here is treason, aye,” said Yolathion. “Please, Aranya, if there’s anything you can do … my honour is worth less than dirt. Her life hangs by a thread. Can you …”

Aranya smiled at Nak. “Dragons do cry, old man. Can it be that I might teach you something about Dragons? Outside, Yolathion. Quickly.”

Oyda took her arm as she limped past th
e kitchen table. “Let’s take that splint off your wrist, Aranya. Nak spent hours carving it for you.”

She paused in the act of taking off the simple dress she wore around Nak and Oyda, thinking that of all the awkward moments in her life, undressing
purposely in front of her would-be killer must win out. Aranya did not know what to say to him. She felt Islands apart from him, yet a single kind word from his lips might reduce her to tears. He seemed a dark river, full of undercurrents she did not understand.

Nak smacked Yolathion with one of his canes. “Avert thy eyes, pup, lest thou ogle the peerless beauty of Immadia.”

Aranya tore off her clothing and transformed. An Amethyst Dragon bowed her neck over the still form of Princess Zuziana. When she saw how cold and unmoving her friend lay, and the sepulchral hollow of her cheeks, her hearts were moved. A tingling manifested in her cheeks. Tears crystallized on her lower eyelids.

“She seemed to
improve,” Yolathion said, “but only briefly. She asked for you, Aranya. I told her how you escaped our nets and dived into the Cloudlands. She laughed then, a little; she bade me bring her hence, saying I was a fool for thinking I had killed you. Then she collapsed, unable to speak again. I did not kill you, but I hurt you sorely, I fear.”

Raising her paw to her eye, Aranya settled a drop on her talon. “Open her mouth, Yolathion.”

Her Dragon ears judged the pounding of his heart as they bent together over the Princess of Remoy. He was afraid. Adrenalin rushed through his veins, telling him he should flee this terrible creature who overshadowed him, who doubtless had every reason in the Island-World to kill him. Yet all she could think of was that Zuziana’s breathing was a whisper, her heartbeat almost too faint to hear. Death had her life in its talons.

Aranya put her claw to her friend’s lips, and tipped the crystal droplet into her mouth.

“What magic is this?” asked Nak. “Know thee what this is, o my jewel?”

“I don’t,” said Aranya. “But if it saves her life, it will be enough. Oyda, have you–”

“No, petal.” She knelt with stiff knees and massaged Zip’s throat with her fingers to encourage her to swallow. “But then I never saw an Amethyst Dragon either, nor do I know of lore which speaks of such as you. I’d caution you regarding Dragon magic–”

“Dragon magic is passing strange,” Nak declaimed, pinning Yolathion with a jealous glare. “Think thee to chain the winds of the morning, Sylakian? Shalt thou despise the golden radiance of the suns,
locking them in thy dungeon forever?”

“Yet if Remoy lives, then I have done my duty at last,” Yolathion said softly
. His voice developed a tremor as he gazed up into Aranya’s burning Dragon eyes. “I knew … my heart spoke, but I was deaf to its eloquence. I have been summoned to appear before the Supreme Commander to explain my failure and mismanagement of Sylakia’s forces. He demands to know how one Dragon and her Rider can cause such chaos.”