Hualiama pictured a map in her head. “You’re thinking they switched direction? I’d guess offshore of Naphtha … but that’s relatively close to Fra’anior.” The Dragon showed rather more of his fangs than Lia would have preferred. She pouted, “Pray explain the workings of your incredibly dense reptilian brain, you overweening tyrant, and stop oppressing me!”
“Op-pressing?” Flicker hooted. “Good one, Lia!”
Affecting a haughty sneer, Grandion pontificated, “Pay attention, you vanishingly primitive life-form. Human cartographers have clearly passed their delusions on to you. It is over seven hundred leagues from Fra’anior to the Western Isles, a distance not even the most powerful Dragon could traverse in a single flight. Noxia to the Western Isles measures nine hundred and fifty leagues, give or take a few Dragons’ tails.”
“Correction noted, you suns-addled lizard,” she retorted. “So?”
Flicker said, “So our route must lie northwest, past Remia to Horness Cluster. From there, there’s a little known under-Cloudlands ridge by which we might be able to Island-hop to the Western Isles. We skirt the Western Isles, exploring southward. There are plenty of hiding places up to a hundred leagues offshore of the main body of the Western Isles–isolated Islets, boulders, volcanoes and such. If your family are anywhere to be found, it will be there.”
“Bravo, little one,” said Grandion, “and the Dragonkind beat Humankind for two minutes of history, at least.” With that, he raised his paw.
Lia stormed up the length of the Dragon’s body to kick him in the neck. Hurting her foot was rather pointless, but Grandion’s goggle-eyed reaction certainly was gratifying.
* * * *
Looking to the skies, Grandion said, “What say you we make the hop over to Remia Island and roost there for the night?”
Handy, when you could ‘hop’ several hundred leagues from Island to Island. Lia considered all the preparations she would have made for such a journey in her solo Dragonship–stores of food and fuel, filling up on hydrogen gas, extra ropes and sails … and a Tourmaline Dragon simply spread his wings and flew where his whimsy took him. She was just beginning to feel sour about the differences between her huge draconic companion and her wingless, fireless, talon-less self, when the Dragon suddenly nosed the back of her neck and rumbled:
“Best clothe thyself, o Princess of Fra’anior, before this despicable beast develops a craving for Human sustenance.”
How his voice trembled her Island! Lia, making for her clothes and weapons over a perfectly even, lush stretch of meadow grass, yelped as her knees crumpled–she managed a frightfully undignified wobble that turned into a hands-and-knees scramble, landing her on top of her belongings with a huff of infuriation. Grandion’s hot snort of laughter flipped her hair over her head. Sly beast! He knew exactly what mischief he had wrought. When Hualiama made to mount up, he offered her his cupped forepaw with a measure of debonair flair that threatened to put the most pompous Fra’aniorian courtier to shame. Fire blossomed in Lia’s cheeks as she lowered her eyes to evade his scrutiny, while her breath quickened for no good reason.
What peculiar mood possessed the Dragon?
Worse, what was wrong with her? Surely, she no longer feared the Dragon? And she was no giddy thirteen year-old to simper over handsome courtiers or servants at the palace. Unlike her sister Fyria, Lia had always regarded herself as the one with her feet firmly grounded on her Island, and to the windrocs with self-indulgent behaviour. Now her feet were grounded upon a Dragon’s shoulders, about to fly ten thousand feet above the Islands.
Life seemed a different prospect when soaring Dragonback.
Trumpeting, “Let’s burn the heavens together as Dragon and Rider!” Grandion launched into the sky on the wings of turbulent emotion. Power and grace. Fire and fury. He exhibited a driving anger which Lia did not understand, but it mirrored how she felt when she thought about Ianthine, and considered the curl of her claw about an innocent baby. There were depths to that interaction she could not fully grasp; an intertwined fate whose story was yet to be written upon the scrolleaf.
And so it was that as the dread of her future threatened to embroil Hualiama and drag her into the toxic Cloudlands of despair, Grandion began to sing:
Still be thy soul, let thy fears take flight,
Gaze upon the dawn bright and fair,
For the spirit of fire unquenchable lives on,
There is no death, only flame everlasting.
Dragons had three areas of the long throat in which to produce sound simultaneously–the booming depths of the chest,