to make further inquiries from the Maroon Dragoness. Besides, Ianthine revealed that your mother tortured her. Revenge is reason enough to snatch a baby, surely?”
Hualiama marched from one side of the cavern to the other, demanding, “How does a Human–any Human–go about torturing a Dragon as powerful as Ianthine? Riddle me that, Grandion! How powerful would my mother have to be?” Right beneath the Tourmaline Dragon’s nose, she whirled, wringing her hands in frustration. “Even at Fra’anior, home to the most ancient of Dragon magic, where some Humans like me display magical powers–Grandion, it’s impossible! Far beyond the Isle of belief! Moreover, why keep the child? Why not toss it into the Cloudlands, Islands’ sakes?”
The Dragon seemed flustered. Lia laid her hand against the warm scales of his neck, sensing that the powerful male Dragon would prefer to feel in control of events, to possess the answers his Rider sought. Thanks for letting me vent, Grandion.
He touched her shoulder with his talon. I’m constantly astonished by the volcanic passions burning in your breast, like a little Dragoness. Do not apologise. These are fearful, Island-shaking conundrums.
“Because,” began Flicker. As his companions turned to him, the dragonet coughed uneasily. He seemed as fearful as Lia had ever known him to be, a creature bereft of hope. “Because, ‘It comes with an innocent face, unaware of the secrets locked within its breast’.”
An involuntary whimper escaped her throat before Hualiama found heated words spilling out, “But what, Flicker? If even an Ancient Dragon was unable to put his claw on this secret I’m supposed to be holding, how great a secret could it be?”
Both of her friends shuddered.
The dragonet whispered, “I wish you hadn’t said it quite that way, Lia. It’s at least great enough to leave that scar on your belly, and to make an Orange Dragon hunt you.”
“And to drive a Maroon Dragoness to an act of desperation which has exiled her from the Dragonkind for fifteen and a half years,” Grandion added, drawing Lia to him with a gentle nudge of his paw, curled around her shoulders. “Furthermore, Amaryllion may be playing in deeper lava pits than you or I could imagine.”
“He’s my friend.” Lia sounded plaintive, and hated herself for being on the defensive. “Look, I trust Amaryllion. He’s never given me reason not to trust him.”
The Tourmaline Dragon made no reply, but the surging vibration of his belly-fires betrayed his thoughts. She knew as well as they did, that an Ancient Dragon’s motives might be completely incomprehensible to any ordinary Dragon, Human or dragonet. He was over two thousand years old. Plenty of time to learn how to manipulate the lives of those smaller than he.
They all three sighed as one.
* * * *
The Western Isles were a dense, untamed archipelago sprawling all of the thousands of leagues from Haffal Cluster in the north to the shores of the Rift, the impassable storm said to divide the northern Island-World from a far larger demesne to the south. If the Rift was truly impassable, Lia had often wondered, how did the legends tell of Herimor? Had the Ancient Dragons passed down tales to their slaves? Here, the Islands were so rough-edged and scattered, they seemed incomplete, a vast draconic jigsaw left unfinished upon such a table as might have dwarfed even the greatest Dragon of all, Fra’anior.
They hunted up and down the shores of Naphtha Cluster, peering at every one of its hundreds of outlying islets and outcroppings, without success. Thick vegetation piled over dense clusters of rock and sudden inlets in the Islands, with fractured ravines and gaping caverns that all took time to investigate. Few Islands could be discounted from afar. Flicker spied a Human settlement on one Isle; he disappeared to filch a quiver of arrows to resupply Lia’s bow.
“You can’t just steal like that!” Hualiama admonished him.
The dragonet shrugged his shoulder in a Human-like gesture. “You can’t just ride a Dragon like that.”
They exchanged ferocious growls before bursting into laughter. Grandion accused them of acting like a pair of cackling parakeets. Lia ordered the dragonet to return to the Humans with a gemstone for payment, in exchange for the promise of cleaning and polishing his scales for an hour.
Late in the afternoon of the third day of their search, Grandion began to drift further south. Flying over yet another overgrown patch of boulders poking out of the Cloudlands in the improbable shape of a Human’s clenched fist surmounting a slender tower of rock, the Dragon unwittingly