faster with a blade than any man has a right to be.”
“Lia kill bad-bad man.”
“Lia has two small, clumsy hands, and …” Suddenly, words exploded from her in a scream, “I’m too little and I just can’t do it, you brainless, stupid animal! Can’t you understand? Oh …”
Her outburst had driven him away. Shaking, Lia watched the dragonet disappear above an overhang. She was alone. Too bitter, too furious and ashamed even to cry, Hualiama stared at her fingers. Fingers that became clumsy, blade in hand. Slender arms that would never have the muscle to beat a man like Ra’aba. Not a drop of magic pulsed in her veins. No, the not-quite Princess of Fra’anior was no-one special.
“I’m not enough,” she whispered. “All I ever wanted was to be a Dragon, and here I am, trapped in this pathetic body. I’ve had a chance many people would kill for, being adopted by a King. Even that has slipped away. I just wish I could be … more.”
Were these just childhood dreams, a fantasy which should have evaporated like the mists of a Fra’aniorian dawn as she grew up?
She was who she was.
Growing up was a favourite mantra of her father’s. Lately, it seemed to her that Shyana’s influence had tempered his rage, but the King daily trod the cliff edge between political machinations and open hostility with the Dragons. Hualiama had long ago learned to placate him, or she faced being beaten by fist, belt or boot, and once even with a heavily jewelled sceptre. His moods could change at the snap of a finger. Unfairly often, it seemed, she was the target. Lia knew why. Being the royal ward simply meant having to enjoy less love than her royal siblings.
Why should she always strive to prove herself to King Chalcion?
Was this why she yearned to know the Dragons? A soul-deep cry for Dragonish love? Lia winced as this forbidden notion slipped into her mind. Beat it out–immoral, deceitful girl! On that Island lay a fate worse than being dumped off a Dragonship.
As the twin suns wheeled overhead, shortening Ha’athior’s westward-facing shadow until she was no longer protected from the direct glare, Hualiama tied the pitiful scrap of material she had cut off her dress-hem atop her head. Oh, horror of the deepest Cloudlands, she was showing her knees to these lemurs! She giggled manically. No point in dying of exposure, least of all for decency’s sake. Moisture steamed off the vegetation trailing down the cliff. Somewhere nearby she heard the trickle of a waterfall, which would likely evaporate before ever reaching the Cloudlands, adding to the day’s haze. Lia picked a likely route, and wormed her way upward.
Hmm. Those linger-vines …
The tough, fibrous vines grew hundreds of feet long, and formed the staple of the ropes used around the Isles to tie Dragonship cabins beneath the bulging hydrogen sacks, to haul goods and to make nets for fishing the terrace lakes of several of the Islands, not to mention many other uses. Experimentally, she looped one beneath her leather belt. Aye, that could work. Tie herself to one vine in case she fell, while climbing another? One-handed?
Lia looped a section of vine around her legs. Now she could hold it with her feet, while she stretched for the next handhold.
Aye. It took her half an hour of slithering up vines to crest the overhang, but Lia was rewarded with the discovery of what appeared to be an ascending animal-trail leading southward around the Island.
“Ha,” she said, “I don’t need a dragonet, I just need Human brains and ingenuity.”
Her scowl, however, told the truth. She missed Flicker, despite all his silly posturing. Endless chatter, silly witticisms … no mind. Whistling a jaunty tune to pick up her spirits, Lia scrambled over the rocks, following a trail clearly never meant for the tread of a Human foot.
The jagged volcanic rocks made short work of her pretty royal slippers. Lia hurled the remnants over the edge with a frustrated shriek, before biting her lip. She could have used those. For firelighters? A smile curved her lips as she peered out at the Island-World through veils of trailing ferns and vanilla-scented flowering vines, and between trees growing horizontally out of the cliff side, bowing their boughs as if in worship of the great, uncrossable ocean of Cloudlands. Briefly, a cloud of luminous orange giant monarch butterflies swirled out of the foliage, the hand-sized insects wreathing her body as though intending to clothe her