The Dragons of Noor (20 page)

“Roll up your sleeves,” said Kanoae.

Meer Eason began to hum. Then he raised the knife and deftly cut a slit in Miles’s left upper arm. Miles bit down on his tongue as he felt the stinging blade. Meer Eason continued to hum, as a tiny rivulet of blood ran down to Miles’s elbow, over the burned patch from his earlier falcon shift, and dripped onto the sand. Kanoae pressed a clean cloth against his stinging flesh.

Miles took a sharp breath, as Meer Eason pulled a folded leather square from his pocket. He opened it and tossed twelve round seeds into the air.

The Damusaun breathed fire on them. The seeds turned from brown to bright orange as they flew up in the heat. They spun higher and higher like sparks from a fire before cascading down again. Eason caught them in his cloth and held them near Miles’s chin.

“Breathe your keth-kara on them,” he said softly.

Miles’s head spun. His keth-kara was the sacred sound eOwey voiced to form him in the womb. The Falconer had sung it to him last year, but only when he was in great need of healing from the Shriker’s wounds.

“Will you … Are you going to take it away from me?”

Eason’s mouth twitched into the shadow of a smile. “No one can take your keth-kara from you, son.”

Meer Eason waited, but how could his teacher ask him to intone his keth-kara in front of the dragons? In front of everyone present here? Eason held his gaze.

Kanoae said, “Your keth-kara will awaken them.”

Miles looked from one face to another. He licked his lips and began to sing over the glowing seeds, softly at first, then louder. There was an answering in the wind, or seemed to be. The orange seeds began to unfurl. Tiny glowing worms wriggled on the leather cloth.

“That’s it,” encouraged Eason. “Now, this will burn.”

The dragons gathered round with Hanna as Eason held the leather cloth beside Miles’s left arm. The worms inched across the leather, entered the knife slit, and disappeared under his skin. Miles gritted his teeth to keep from screaming.

Glowing spots swam under his skin as the worms
traveled down his left arm to his hand. His palm burned as if placed on the stove. He crumpled to the sand to cool his burning hand in the water bowl.

“Wait,” warned Kanoae.

Miles held his hand above the bowl. Surely, the ceremony was over. He’d given away his sacred name. They’d cut his arm, fed worms into his flesh. What more could they ask of him?

“Now,” said Eason.

Miles plunged his hand in the water and felt relief. When the flesh was cool at last, he stood again. His legs felt weak, and he was cold and shivering now. Kanoae tied a cloth about his upper arm.

“That’s better,” Miles said through chattering teeth.

The Damusaun breathed fire. Taberrells and terrows parted so Miles could draw closer to the flames. When the worms had crawled into his arm, he’d wanted only water, only cold. Now he needed warmth again.

Miles held his hands toward the flames. His palm was no longer painful. He felt only the smallest tickle where the worms had gathered under the skin.

“Show us, Miles,” called Hanna. She was beaming at him.

“He will be the first meer since the Mishtar to find his sign with dragon fire,” said Eason proudly.

Suddenly Miles understood what the tingling in his palm meant. He’d not been singled out to be reprimanded for Endour’s death or for shape-shifting. They’d initiated him as a meer. His heart raced. He’d never seen the ritual on Othlore. It was always done in secret. One apprentice at a time would enter the dome room, emerging later red-faced and sweating, proudly bearing a palm sign. No one ever divulged what happened inside.

Now he knew. He was smiling, brimming with excitement. He held the flat of his hand out a little longer until the Damusaun’s flames died down. Then the she-dragon honored him by reading aloud the ancient Othic sign.
“Quava-arii.”

Miles recognized the words to the song Meer Eason offered on the ship the night he walked the plank.

“It is the right word for a shape-shifter,” agreed Kanoae.

Miles bent his arm. The blue symbol on his palm seemed to glow with its own inner light. A spiral shape with a crescent in the middle. The crescent shape stood for loss, the spiral for renewal. He followed the spiral
with his eyes. At first it seemed to be spinning outward, but as he looked more closely, it appeared to be spinning in. It was both, he knew suddenly; the symbol itself was ever changing. He laughed with relief and gratitude. He was a meer in his own right. A meer now and forever.

Waves drummed the sand as Miles bowed to the Dragon Queen. He stayed down, arms and knees trembling, collapsed with joy, exhaustion, and disbelief. He wanted to shout, laugh, dance, cry.

At last, the Damusaun said, “Rise, pilgrim. You are a meer now.”

Miles’s legs shook uncontrollably. He wasn’t sure he could obey. But this was the Damusaun’s first command to him as a meer. He got to his feet, wanting to thank her, thank them all. His heart was so full he couldn’t speak.

“It was bold of you to shift to dragon’s form,” said the queen. “Only one meer before your time has done this.”

“Mishtar,” said the dragon to her left.

The cliff walls seemed to echo the name as all the dragons repeated it. Miles swayed. He knew the Mishtar had practiced the art of shifting. The first High Meer knew all the ways of magic, but he’d never heard of him or anyone else daring to change into a dragon.

“Now,” said the Dragon Queen, “your meer sign pledges you to honor all your oaths.”

Miles nodded, glimpsing for a moment a purpose for the ceremony here, before another battle.

“You understand me,” she said. It was a private speech between the two of them. The Damusaun expected him to honor the pledge he’d made to her not to kill. She had a shape-shifter fighting alongside her. A help. A risk. A danger. If he killed in dragon’s form, everything would be lost. The Dragon Queen’s gift to him had also served her own purpose. She meant to bind him to his word through this meer sign.

“I understand,” he said.

The Damusaun held him in her gaze a moment longer, then addressed the rest of the company. “Our patrols have not seen any more trebuchets. To the best of our knowledge, we have destroyed them all.” The dragons beat their tails happily.

“Still, I warn all to fly with care,” she added. “Now we fly to destroy the Cutters’ cache of saws, axes, and root poison. The last Waytrees must stand!”

M
iles clung to Dramui’s neck ridge as she flew soundlessly over another Cutters’ camp. Higher up the moonlit mountain, he caught sight of the Damusaun. Behind her, Hanna and Kanoae flew on their terrows. His sister had spent all afternoon and night searching the last remaining azure grove, looking for the right Waytree to usher her into Oth before it was too late. Miles’s dry throat stung. He licked his chapped lips.
Find the way
, he thought.
Bring Tymm home
.

There were so few Waytrees left now. The dragons had fed the fire walls to keep the Cutters away, yet somehow a few men had managed to sneak past with more root poison. The dragons were betting the Cutters stored
their cache of poison with the saws and axes in the huts they’d found, but they couldn’t be sure.

Taunier rode Findarr over a burning storage hut. Miles felt the intense heat as Dramui dove down. Findarr soared to the left, and Taunier waved his arm to herd stray islands of fire back toward the hut. Dramui added her flames to the others’, torching the walls and devouring the roof. Taunier brought his arms together. The roaring inferno engulfed the Cutters’ saws and axes, turning them into molten puddles.

Men raced up from the camps, shouting and firing their crossbows. Through the heat and smoke, a dragon’s piercing cry rang out. Miles looked up to the mountainside just as Kanoae’s terrow lurched back, flapping her wings wildly. A second black whirring ball cut through the air. The Damusaun turned and sped toward Kanoae’s terrow, but not before Hanna’s terrow doubled over, plummeting toward the ground after Kanoae’s.

“Anteebwey!” Miles screamed the devil’s name. The Cutters must have found a way to hide another trebuchet!

“Turn about, Dramui! Hanna and Kanoae were hit!”

His dragon was dodging arrows and Miles was too impatient to wait for her to wing him up the mountainside.
Abandoning Dramui, he plunged into the air. His back split. The bones in his arms branched out, his skin stretching into wings. The sudden shape-shift knifed his hands, turned his fingers into sharp talons. His neck lengthened, snakelike. A long tail grew from the base of his spine. Sharp teeth jutted from his roaring jaws.

The word he roared was
“Hanna!”
But it came out as fire.

A group of taberrells found the newest trebuchet and set it aflame. More shouts. More screaming. Miles left the raw sounds of battle behind as he sped toward the high meadow where he’d seen the terrows fall.

In the windy meadow he alighted near the Damusaun. Kanoae and her dragon lay in the blowing grass along with Hanna’s terrow. All three were torn open by the spiked balls, their blood black in the dim light. Antig, Shagin. He knew all the dragons’ names now, from hatchling to elderling, for they’d spent long hours together in the cave, and those who fight together come to know each other well even in a short time. The smell of blood, dragon, and human filled the air. He did not need to come any closer to see that Kanone and the terrows were dead.

The Dragon Queen cradled Hanna. Miles tried to
speak as dragons do. No words came; instead, he made a croaking noise. The Damusaun looked up, but it was Hanna’s face he sought. Her skin was pale; her eyelids white. He leaned in closer and pricked his ears to listen for a sign of breath. Wind in the grass, the clicking of katydids, battle sounds in the hills far below. His dragon’s heart pounded as he waited for the quietest of sounds that must be there,
had
to be there.

The Damusaun began to sing. Her dragon’s voice was deep and rough, but Miles understood what she was offering. The Dragon Queen had found his sister’s keth-kara, just as the Falconer had found Miles’s self-sound last year, when he was at the point of death.

The she-dragon sang softly, searching for the right intonation. She would not find it. It would take a human voice to sing the sound. Hanna’s face had a hollow look.
Shift back now
, he thought.
Sing!
But fierce rage at the Cutters still burned inside his chest. He’d have to let go of his wild anger to return to his human shape. He strained to quell the burning, and found the powerful dragon’s form lent him the strength he needed. For Hanna. Let go for Hanna.

Miles focused to shut out the sounds of battle. A
playful breeze blew a strand of light brown hair across his sister’s cheek. Her face was very still. Taking a deep breath, he filled his chest with the cool night air, the deep blue scent of azure needles, the salt smell of the sea. Even as Miles’s chest expanded and the fire in him cooled, his body shrank, his wings and tail disappeared, sharp teeth and talons vanished.

Standing before the Damusaun, he sent the cool air he’d taken from the night back out again as pure sound. The keth-kara the queen was singing changed with his human pitch, the notes correcting themselves between the two of them. Hanna’s keth-kara was earth and sky together, just as it should be for a sqyth-eyed girl.

He sang the song of Old Magic eOwey intoned at Hanna’s beginning, and as the sounds blew out between them, he heard the wind sing them back and saw his sister’s brows lift as if in question. She turned her head, put out her hands, and sat up. Miles wanted to rush over and throw his arms around her, but he recognized her strange inward look and held himself back. Hanna’s face was awash in dream as she climbed out of the Damusaun’s arms. Turning, she began to walk toward the azure trees growing at the far edge of the
high meadow, the only untouched grove still standing on the mountain.

“My sister dreamwalks,” he whispered. Relief flooded through him. She was all right. She would live.

He heard again the sounds of battle from the mountainside. “I have to go,” he said suddenly. “But someone needs to follow Hanna when she dreamwalks. Could you do that please, Damusaun?”

“I will.”

The queen opened her wings. “If you are thinking to shift again in this fight, Miles, remember your vow.”

Miles’s eyes fell on the bodies of his friends in the grass. Kanoae’s arm was draped across Antig’s golden neck. Her foot was wedged against Shagin’s tail, as if the three of them were curled up in sleep.

He’d left Dramui fighting alongside Taunier and the other dragons farther down the mountainside. How many more would have to die? His throat constricted as he blinked back tears. “But they’re killing us, Damusaun.”

A low growl came from her throat. She wasn’t forbidding him to shift, only to control his need for revenge. He bit his lip, tasting his salt tears for Kanoae, the dead terrows at her side, and, before that, for Endour.

The Damusaun’s neck scales rippled as she waited for his answer.

Miles wiped his dripping nose. “Don’t you want to kill the Cutters for what they’ve done?”

The Dragon Queen raised her tail and bashed the ground hard enough for Miles to feel the rumbling in his feet.

“I would crush them with my talons,” she hissed. “Break their bones and burn them if I could. But kill one manling, just one, and we’ll destroy the pardon seven hundred years of peace has earned us.” The Damusaun coiled her tail about Miles’s legs and drew him nearer. Her eyes were two suns in the morning twilight. “If you shift again, you have to promise me, pilgrim.”

He felt the rippling muscles in her tail. She called him pilgrim, though he was not the Dreamwalker or the Fire Herd mentioned in the prophecy.
Bring to us our heart’s desire, one with mastery over fire. From across the eastern sea, come to us, O Pilgrim
. The song line was for Taunier, but he’d gleaned something from his dragon-shifts, he realized. He could have mastery over fire. Not the visible kind that burned on the outside, but the rage that burned within. The dragon’s form had empowered him to do it.