Sword Mountain (33 page)

Pandey snorted. “The only worse thing than being trapped in a crack is being trapped in a crack with a fluttering in your throat.”

“Tickles of death,” said Blaze.

Their chuckles were rudely interrupted.

“Hark! I hear them!” Kawaka's voice boomed loud in the narrow space. “I think I see the gem!”

The group moaned and scrambled frantically upward.

“It's no use. No matter how far we'll go, we're trapped,” groaned Pandey. They hurried, they groped, and the shaft grew narrower, narrower.

“We can stop,” declared Cloud-wing. “We'll just fight to the death!” Kawaka's ragged panting was closer, closer. They imagined that his breath stirred their feathers.

“Great Spirit!” shouted Dandelion as if waking from a dream. “Where you do think that moth came from? Come on!”

The thought roused all six of them. Somewhere above them, the crack in the stone must reach a gap to a bigger place that could sustain life. Maybe they could escape into another cavern, or something! The sides of stone now were soft with soil. After they scrambled up through a final twist in the shaft, a faint twinkle of light appeared above them.

They shuffled as fast as they could, straining to pull themselves up, loosening clawfuls of earth as they went. Feathers ripped off of their necks and backs. Muck smeared their bodies. Dandelion reached up, and her talon unexpectedly tapped a hard ceiling. She thought she had reached the end of the crevice. Groping, she felt an edge.

“What is it?” said Cloud-wing.

“There's a cover,” said Dandelion. She ran her talons over the ceiling again. It was made of stone, faintly moist and furry with moss, and flat compared to the crevice walls. Dandelion raised the Leasorn gem. “It looks unnatural,” she said. “Cloud-wing, I think it can be pushed away.”

The archaeopteryxes' cries were louder, echoing from both ends of the shaft as if they were everywhere, above them and below them at once.

“Go ahead. I'll brace you. Stand on me.”

Dandelion gave the Leasorn gem to Cloud-wing to free her talons. The birds below them offered their support, and they all edged up as far as they could. Dandelion hesitated. One misstep, and they would all go tumbling down into the wings of the archaeopteryxes.

“Don't worry, just do it!” he cried.

Dandelion raised her talons and strained, stifling a scream when she felt Cloud-wing sliding down a little below her. She closed her eyes and pushed harder. They heard a grinding creak.

Pandey yelped. “The archaeopteryxes, they're coming nearer!”

Isobello, farthest down, took out his sling and started shooting pebbles blindly, rapidly down the shaft. Tightly packed, the archaeopteryxes howled below. “I still have enough pebbles,” he said. “I think I can hold them off a few seconds.”

“The cover moved,” Dandelion whispered. “I see a crack.” The four birds below repositioned themselves while Isobello continued to shoot.

“Your sword!” said Cloud-wing. “Use it, Dandelion.”

Dandelion drew her weapon and carefully raised the steel blade. She wedged it into the crack as far as it would go. She leaned on the hilt.

The stone protested and shifted.

“Push!” They pressed close together. Dandelion summoned all her strength and shoved the stone aside.

They saw light. Dandelion used her sword to brace herself and climb out of the shaft. She turned, crouched, and helped Cloud-wing. Together they pulled up the rest of their companions. Dandelion stared at the black-and-white floor she was now standing on, recognizing the throne room in the Castle of Sky as eagle guards dashed in from all sides to see what the commotion was.

“Archaeopteryxes in our mountain!” Dandelion shouted, trying to slam the tile back over the crack they'd come from. She was too late. Kawaka barged out, flinging the slab of stone across the chamber at the guards. His recruits hurled themselves into the chamber, one after another.

Kawaka surveyed the scene. The Castle of Sky, in the heart of the golden eagles' stronghold! There was the empty throne waiting for him once he cleared the castle.
I will rule over both the Castle of Sky and the Castle of Earth
, he thought. “Charge!” he shouted to his soldiers. “Claim the castle for the empire!”

Dandelion lifted her sword as she squinted in the bright light streaming from the windows. A wave of dizziness hit her as if she'd flown too high. Too much, too long. The old archaeopteryx scars on her wings and back pulsed with burning pain.

No
, she said to herself.

Boom, boom, boom.
The sound reverberated, giving Dandelion strength and allowing her to focus. She looked up. A swarm of eaglets filled the room: Fleydur's students, the children of the court. There was Pudding, pounding furiously upon his drum to summon more help. And there was Olga, her ankle ribbons flying as she sent a kick into the behind of an archaeopteryx fighting with an eagle guard.

Cloud-wing shouted to Pudding, and they dashed into the antechamber where the Iron Nest gathered before coming to court. As Dandelion and the other Rockbottom students joined the few castle guards in the battle, the two reappeared with the voting stones of the Iron Nest. Within moments, the eaglets were armed with the big black cubes, hurling yeas and nays left and right upon the heads of the archaeopteryxes.

“Nay to archaeopteryxes!” cried Pudding.

“Yea for our homeland!” cried Cloud-wing.

Howling, archaeopteryxes clutched bruised eyes and cracked beaks as they and the eagles fought across the black-and-white checkered floor.

“Are you okay, Dandelion?” said Olga, appearing alongside her. “Where is your crown, and where are your acorns?”

Dandelion touched her collar, remembering how she thought she would never have a use for them. And yet they had served their purpose as markers, as weapons, as bandage ties....

Along the way, she had gathered something more. Friends who were alive. Love for her mountain. Hope for Fleydur.

Gripping her sword, Dandelion realized she didn't have to attend Rockbottom to be pounded to bits and be put together again. Her various past selves hovered in her mind, as if she was looking at her reflections in the Hall of Mirrors. She had been a peasant, a princess, and now, a warrior. She was not afraid to face an enemy alone anymore. She was her own army.

Kawaka cleaved left and right at his enemies, searching for the eagle with the gemstone. His furnace wounds goaded him like the sting of fire ants. He found Dandelion at last, by the bronze scales. Dandelion pointed her sword at Kawaka, the bird who had snuffed her sky-born candle and taken her parents from her.

“
Eagles don't back down from a rough wind, but always dare to ride on it
.”

They locked eyes. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“You will know me now. I am Dandelion,” she said. “You will not hurt me again, or hurt my home, Sword Mountain.”

Kawaka raised his cutlass and lunged toward Dandelion. Dandelion twirled her sword, knocking the blow aside. In the opening that she'd made, she rushed closer and battered Kawaka across the cheek with her wings, and then spun out of range before the archaeopteryx could snap his beak on her feathers. They fought around and around the bronze eagle statue of justice, whose scales hung from its open wings.

Then Dandelion felt her sword wrenched from her grasp. When she flew down to retrieve it, Kawaka closed in. Her claws touched something else on the ground. She clutched it. A purple voting stone. She hurled it at Kawaka with all her might. Kawaka ducked; the stone struck the scales instead. Dandelion snatched up her sword again and rose. Looming behind Kawaka, the bronze eagle swayed, its scales creaking.

“Sword Mountain is mine,” Kawaka shouted.

The scales slowly tipped forward, as if the bronze eagle was swooping—one edge of the base left the ground. Sensing something was amiss, Kawaka paused to look up, and in that very moment the scales crashed onto him with a thunderous noise.

The fighting ceased immediately.

The bronze eagle had not cracked; neither its wings nor its beak had broken from the impact. Rather, it lay very still, hunched forward as if brooding eggs, and Kawaka's claws, which poked out from under one of its scales, were unmoving.

Unnerved, the few remaining archaeopteryxes bolted toward a window, smashed the glass, and fled. Guards shot arrows after them.

The rest of the mourning train hurried inside. The king, in his death garments, teetered in the doorway. “Our kingdom was on the brink of death. Though famed for our sharpness of sight, we eagles were blind. We—of the strongest army, of the bravest fighters, of the highest peaks—we believed that Sword Mountain would never fall to forces from the outside. Yet it was nearly destroyed, hollowed and undermined by weaknesses and intrigue within.”

Forlath's gaze fell on Dandelion and the Leasorn gem in her claws. “The gemstone has been found!” he exclaimed.

Dandelion, Cloud-wing, and the band of Rockbottom students explained their story. “It was Tranglarhad who stole the gemstone, and he was working together with the archaeopteryxes, beneath our mountain,” Dandelion concluded.

“I don't believe it. How can our mountain have any such fault lines?” cried Sigrid. But the guards examined the floor beneath the throne and confirmed it.

“What fools you are. How could Fleydur have done anything to me?” said Morgan. “My sickness was not caused by him, but by a certain golden pill. I took it the morning of my birthday with my breakfast, as you remember, Sigrid. Where did you get that pill?”

“I believe it was a gift from somebird at court,” said Sigrid. She winced at a sudden memory. “Tranglarhad,” she said in a very small voice. Sigrid covered her face with a set of talons, upset by her own credulity and the owl's betrayal. She had been manipulated to administer the poison pill to the king!

“Your Majesty,” said Dandelion to the king, “then may Fleydur be released?”

“Yes. Oh, my poor son!”

So the word traveled from one guard to another: “Open the dungeon. Free the prisoner. The king is alive and well!”

“Free Fleydur.”

“Free Fleydur!”

Gemstone in claw, Dandelion flew, all the hundred joyous images of her rushing alongside her in the Hall of Mirrors. She spiraled down the staircase, toward the dungeon, and the birds in her way parted to let her rush by. As the dungeon gate creaked open, Dandelion held the purple gem up high, its glow so bright that she needed no torch to guide her.

“Fleydur! You're free. You've been proven innocent!” she cried. “And King Morgan is really alive.” She showed him the gemstone. As the bars slid aside, Dandelion leaped into Fleydur's embrace.

“My brave, strong, bright flower,” he said.