wing. She darted along the pliant membrane, trailing her blades behind her to open a long slice through the flight struts and wing surface, until she struck the secondary wing-joint bone. Ignoring the pain in her wrists, Lia stabbed deep, finding the major arteries feeding the Dragon’s wing. Her Nuyallith blade severed the controlling nerve-bundle. The Dragon slumped toward its maimed wing, flinging her aside …
Smack! A Dragon’s paw. “Grandion!” she gasped, never happier to find huge blue talons clamped around her neck and upper chest.
“Not content to stay where I left you?” he snarled, giving Hualiama a hair-singing blast of the scorching inferno roiling in his throat.
“Not when my Dragon’s in danger,” she hissed back, twisting to scan the air around them. Count the Reds. One spiralled helplessly into the Cloudlands, his tattered wing no longer serving to keep him aloft. Just fifty feet less would have dropped him safely upon the peninsula. A second Red was grounded, the wounds in his neck and chest spurting golden Dragon blood with ghastly force. Grandion’s bite must have penetrated the ventricles of the Dragon’s second heart. Where was the third Red?
He growled, “My Dragon?”
“My Dragon Rider? Grandion, watch out–”
He reacted with a Dragon’s incredible swiftness. Somehow rolling to dodge the incoming fireball, Grandion lunged out with jaws agape to sink his fangs into the upper portion of the Red Dragon’s muzzle, up near the eyes and ear canals. A ghastly crackling sound ensued. Flesh sizzled. Sweetly acrid smoke poured out of his mouth for heartbeat after heartbeat, unending; Hualiama realised that Grandion had launched his most powerful Blue Dragon attack, lightning, right into the bite wound, cooking the other Dragon’s brain in the process. Mercy.
The Red Dragon fell, flaccid in death.
Panting hard with residual rage and effort, Grandion circled swiftly, checking that the Red who had fallen over the edge would not recover. Hualiama sucked in her breath as she saw the Dragon smash into an outcropping a mile below before cartwheeling away in an unnatural flurry of broken limbs and wings. Then the Tourmaline Dragon landed beside the final Red, who was incapacitated, too weak even to flex a talon in his defence.
Who sent you? Grandion growled.
Razzior the Orange, wheezed the other. He knows all about your pathetic plan … to rouse the monasteries. The Dragon’s eye, dulled now with the leaching away of his fires into the eternal darkness, lit upon Hualiama. Who are you, Human, presuming to ride a Dragon? Such … has never …
The eye shuttered. The faint beat of his Dragon hearts fell silent.
May your soul burn in the eternal fires of all Dragonkind, said Grandion, in a voice thick with regret. Lia, I must dispatch these Dragons on their final journey. See to your dragonet. Be ready to fly.
I will be.
The scrolls of Dragon lore recorded at length the Dragonish practice of settling issues by open combat. Now, having experienced it for herself, Lia wished there were another way, for the travesty of seeing the fires of a Dragon’s very soul snuffed out, caused an Island’s weight of sorrow to lodge within her breast. As she walked up to where the dragonet lay, the powerful beat of Grandion’s wings blasted dust about her feet. He dragged the two Red Dragon corpses off the peninsula to drop them over the Cloudlands, sending them on their final journey.
Flicker raised his head at her approach. You have become powerful, straw-head, he murmured. Who would have thought I raised you so well?
How Lia laughed!
* * * *
When Flicker awoke, it was to find himself in his favourite place in the world, which, he decided, only narrowly beat nosing about in a warm abdominal cavity for intestines. They flew in at cool altitudes never visited by dragonets, as if ascending the visible curve of the Island-World. He lay in Lia’s lap wrapped in her tunic top; she had stripped down to provide him a snug cloth burrow. If he was not mistaken, he had been bathed with something that teased his nostrils most agreeably. He would rather be chased by a thousand rajals than budge from this spot.
Lia and the proud Tourmaline Dragon conversed in low tones.
Three days travel to Rolodia Island, said Grandion. I know a fine place to roost this evening.
What of your wounds, Grandion?
Bah, mere cuts and grazes. What do you think your dragonet told them, Rider?
Rider? Flicker’s ire piqued at Grandion’s choice of words. But the growling of his belly fires mellowed when Lia said, He