Blood of Dragons (11 page)

A word to the wise is sufficient.

Getting the dragons from the riverside meadow to the bridge had taken more time and much more effort than anyone had expected. Sedric stood beside Carson and watched the last of the large dragons go down the steep slope to the old road below them. They had eroded a trough in the steep bank, setting off slides of mud, rock, soil and branches that now spattered out in a fan across the old road below. Tinder was the last to go. By the time he reached the road surface, Nortel's lavender dragon was dirty brown from his shoulders down.

Only the two smaller dragons, Relpda and Spit, remained. ‘Nasty cold wet mud,' Relpda complained.

‘I tried to get you to go first, before the others loosened the slope,' Sedric reminded her.

‘Did not like. Do not like. It's too steep.'

‘You'll be fine. You'll slide down and then you'll be at the bottom,' Sedric tried to reassure her.

‘You'll roll like a rock and be lucky not to break both your wings,' Spit suggested spitefully. His silvery-grey eyes were tinged with red as they spun slowly. He seemed to relish the distress he was triggering in Relpda. Sedric wanted to hit him with something large. He smothered the thought before Relpda or Spit could react to it and tried to suffuse his thoughts and voice with calmness.

‘Relpda, listen to me. I would not ask you to do anything that I thought would hurt you. We have to get down from here, and there's only one way. We need to slide down the hill, and then we can join the other dragons on the bridge.'

‘And once you're there, he wants you to jump off the bridge and into the water and drown.' Spit sounded absolutely enthused with the idea.

‘Dragon,' Carson warned him sternly, but the little silver was unrepentant. ‘My keeper wants me to drown, too,' he confided to Relpda. ‘Then he won't have to hunt as often to feed me. He'll have more time to jostle around in his bedding with your keeper.'

Carson didn't respond with words. He simply lunged forward suddenly, his shoulder striking his dragon's haunch with the full force of his weight behind it. Spit had been loitering too near the edge, peering with disapproval at the long, steep drop. The small silver dragon scrabbled wildly to regain his clutch on the hillside, but succeeded only in loosening more earth. He lashed his tail, knocking Carson's feet from under him, and then they were suddenly both sliding down the hill, fishtailing in the muddy chute, with Carson lunging and getting a grip of the top of Spit's wing. The dragon trumpeted wildly as they went, but it was only when Carson added a whoop of his own that Sedric realized neither of them was truly upset at the abrupt descent.

‘They like it? The being dirty and going fast down the hill?' Copper Relpda echoed his confusion.

‘Apparently,' Sedric replied dubiously. Carson and Spit reached the bottom and rode a spray of loosened earth out into the road. Getting to his feet, Carson brushed uselessly at his clothing and called back up the hill, ‘Not so bad, really. Come on down.'

‘I suppose there's no help for it,' Sedric replied. He scanned the hillside below him, trying to see if there were not an easier, safer, cleaner way to descend. The other dragons and their keepers were already making their way out onto the broken bridge. Carson waited for them, looking up at them. Spit had opened his wings and was shaking them out, heedless of how he spattered his keeper with mud.

‘Don't take all day!' Carson called up good-naturedly.

‘She is always the slowest,' Spit complained.

‘I'm coming!' Sedric shouted reluctantly. He turned sideways to the slope, resolving to walk at a slant across the steep face.

‘No dirt!' Relpda replied stubbornly.

‘My copper beauty, I don't like it any better than you do. But we must get down.' He didn't even want to think of the upcoming challenge he'd face when he tried to persuade her to leap from the bridge in flight. He thought she could do it. All of the dragons had practised so earnestly of late, and most had shown some skill at gliding at least. He was almost certain that she could take flight and safely reach Kelsingra. Almost. He pushed his worry aside. Carson had been warning him about that. He could not doubt Relpda without making her doubt herself.

Moving to one side of the mud chute the larger dragons had created, he began a cautious descent, cutting across the steep face of the hill at a slant. He had gone perhaps five steps when his braced lower foot abruptly slid out from under him. He slammed hip-first to the ground, rolled onto his belly and made a frantic grab for some nearby coarse grasses, only for them to tear free from the earth in his grasp. He was sliding. The suppressed guffaw from Carson and the wild trumpeting of amusement from Spit did not ameliorate his predicament. Twice, his body almost stopped, but as soon as he tried to come to his feet, he slid again. By the time he reached the bottom of the slope and managed to sit up, Carson was at his side, offering him a hand up.

‘That wasn't funny,' Sedric began indignantly, but the merriment dancing in Carson's eyes above his tightly pinched mouth could not be denied. Sedric came to his feet grinning, and spent a few moments brushing gravel, burrs and mud from his Elderling tunic and trousers. When he had finished, his hands were dirty, but the garments gleamed deep blue and silver just as much as they had before. He looked up at Carson. The hunter's stained leathers were still streaked with mud.

‘I told you that you should try these garments. Rapskal brought back plenty of them.'

Carson shrugged sheepishly. ‘Old habits die hard.' Then, at the disappointment in Sedric's eyes, he added, ‘Perhaps after we all transfer to the city. I feel a bit awkward, calling attention to myself in bright colours.'

‘You don't like them on me?'

Carson smiled wickedly. ‘I like them better off you. But yes, I like them on you. But it's different. You're beautiful. You should wear beautiful things.'

Sedric shook his head to the compliment even as it warmed him. Carson was Carson, and in the greater scheme of things, Sedric had no desire to change him. If pressed, he would have to admit now that there was a special rough attraction to Carson in his coarse clothing. There was something comfortingly competent in the way he wore the product of his hunts.

‘I like them, too,' Spit observed abruptly. ‘They make him smell like killing and meat. A good way to smell.'

Sedric turned away from the knowledge that the silver dragon sometimes seemed a bit too aware of his innermost thoughts. He looked up the steep hill at Relpda, who had ventured to the edge and was looking down at them, shifting her front feet nervously as she did so. Save for Carson and Spit, the others had gone on without them. ‘Make haste, my copper queen, or we shall be left behind!'

‘And you will be the last to leap, as you've been last at everything else!' Spit mocked her unfairly. ‘Come, copper cow, find one straw of courage and tumble down the hill to join us.'

‘Make him stop mocking her,' Sedric complained angrily to Carson. ‘He'll make her angry and then I can't persuade her to do anything.' Even at this distance, Sedric could see red anger sparking in Relpda's whirling eyes. She lifted her head, her neck arching and the frills along it standing erect with fury. Her colours grew brighter; her whole body gleamed with her anger like a copper kettle on an overheated stove.

‘The last?' she cried out. ‘You shall be last, and mateless forever, you shiny toad!' She transferred her angry gaze to Sedric. ‘No mud!' she proclaimed, and abruptly whirled away from the edge and vanished from his sight.

‘Now see what you've done!' he rebuked the unrepentant silver. ‘She'll go all the way back to the village and it will take me another whole day to bring her …'

He never completed his sentence. He heard her thunderous tread and looked up to see her race up to the edge and leap into the air.

‘Run!' Carson bellowed; but Sedric couldn't. He stared upward, fearful for her and for himself.

Relpda snapped her wings open and he cowered, hands over his head, as the little copper dragon fell toward them. Her wings spread wide and as he peered up at her in sheer terror, he saw her beat them frantically. He closed his eyes.

A moment later, uncrushed, he opened them again. Carson was looking up, his mouth opened in astonishment. Spit's triumphant shout penetrated his brain. ‘She flies! The copper queen flies!'

Sedric strained to see what Carson watched. Then the big man put his arm around him and pointed out at the river. It took Sedric a moment to make sense of what he was seeing. His dragon. The day was overcast but still she glittered, copper against the dull pewter of the river's surface. Her wings were stretched wide and she was in a glide. She was losing altitude and Sedric could predict exactly where she would contact the river's surface, well short of the middle. ‘Fly!' he shouted, his voice a hoarse roar. ‘Beat your wings, Relpda! Fly!'

Carson's grip tightened on his shoulders. The hunter was silent but Sedric knew he shared his agony. Down by the bridge, he could hear the voices of the other keepers raised in anxious questions. Dortean trumpeted wildly and Veras echoed him more shrilly.

‘FLY!' It was a roar of command, full of fury, and it came from silver Spit. The silver dragon capered up onto his hind legs, opening his own wings and beating them in futile frustration. ‘Fly!'

Sedric could not watch and yet he could not tear his eyes from her. He could feel Relpda's terror and her excitement at how the wind swept past her. He knew how she struggled to pull her body into alignment. Then, beat and beat and beat, she began to work her wings. Her leap from the embankment had thrown her into a long swoop, and she had had to do little more than outstretch her wings to ride the air. But now ancient memories were stirring. She had been a queen and once she had ruled these skies.

‘Don't think! Just fly!' Spit roared at her. And then he took off in a lumbering run.

‘Spit!' Carson shouted and set off in pursuit. Sedric could not stand still. He raced after them, feeling the wind on his own face and the rush of air past Relpda's outstretched neck and how the air over the moving water buffeted her. He forced himself to halt. He closed his eyes tightly.

‘With you, Relpda. Fly, my beauty. Nothing else. Only flying.'

Ever since he had drunk her blood, he had shared her awareness. Sometimes it had been merely distracting, and at other times it had been overwhelming. He had not stopped to think that being linked to him might be not just a distraction but a source of doubt for her. No doubts now. Nothing but a copper queen and the free air and Kelsingra in the distance, calling to her. He poured himself into her, willing strength to her wings and confidence to her heart.

‘Spit, NO!' Somewhere in the distance, he heard Carson's voice. With steel resolve, he kept his focus as it was. Wings beating steadily now. The sound of the water rushing by below him was only a sound; it could not pull him down and under. Ahead, the gleaming stone walls of Kelsingra beckoned him. There would be warmth there, he promised her, warmth and shelter from the endless rain and wind. There would be hot water to rest in, to ease away the endless ache of cold.

I come, copper queen. We rise in flight together.

The thought pushed into the mind they shared. It was Spit. He had leapt from the bridge, pushing past the larger dragons to be the first to make the jump.
I have caught the wind itself beneath me and I come to you. We rise together!

The beating of Relpda's glittering wings suddenly surged to a new level. The rhythm was slower, the downward push more powerful. She rose, the river receding beneath her, and for a long giddying moment, Sedric shared her view of the countryside that spread out below her. He had never imagined that any creature could see such a distance in such detail. A human standing upon a mountain might see such a panorama, but could never detect the elk drowsing on the hillside, or the movement in the deep grass of a meadow that was not wind but the passage of a herd of small, goatlike creatures. Abruptly he could smell them, the musky male that led them and five, no, six females that followed him. Detailed information poured into his mind in a way he had never experienced. When he abruptly broke free of his contact with Relpda he was not sure if she had pushed him away or if he had fled.

He stood, blinking at the day around him, feeling as if he had just awakened from an extraordinary dream. His vision seemed hazed, and he closed his eyes and then rubbed them before he could accept that his problem was merely a return to ordinary human sight. He gave his head a shake and looked around. The other dragons and keepers were all gathered at the end of the road on the bridge approach. Carson was running back toward him, a strange look between joy and terror on his face. Motion on the bridge caught his eye and he saw orange Dortean suddenly gallop up the bridge approach, pause for a heartbeat and then leap off. As he did so, he snapped his wings wide open, revealing markings like large bright-blue blossoms on them. He pulled his body into perfect alignment, making himself an arrow. As Sedric watched, he did not drop at all, but rose on powerful strokes of his wings. On the bridge approach behind him, Kase capered and danced in wild joy at his dragon's triumphant launch. His cousin Boxter raced out to join him, pounding him on the back and laughing wildly as Kase pointed up at his dragon. Then they abruptly halted their celebration and fled to one side to be clear of Skrim as the long, skinny dragon made his own dash for the end of the bridge. He did not hesitate, but flung himself out, a second orange arrow in flight. His long narrow body undulated like a snake as he fought his way higher and higher into the sky.

‘Sedric!' Carson's shout distracted him from Skrim's successful launch. ‘Sedric, did you see him? Do you see them now?'