That was when she spied a slit reptilian eye peering at her from the greenery just beside her head.
“Unholy windrocs!” she gasped, throwing herself backward.
The python struck, but missed by inches as Lia scrambled along in full retreat, trying somehow to keep one eye on her footing and the other on the reptile’s advance. Now she knew what type of trail this was–a trail frequented by pythons large enough to make a tidy meal of undersized royal wards. The trail skirted the cliff edge beneath an overhang in this part. No climbing here. She needed to pass the snake.
Right. May her courage swell from the size of a mouse’s meal to Dragonish proportions.
Hualiama eyed the golden-backed python as balefully as it eyed her. “Come here! I’ll give you this dagger to eat.” She felt for a stone near her foot. Swoop, strike! “Get out of here! Go on!”
Snakes as large as pythons were uncommon on her Island, but Lia knew that in theory, noise and vibration should chase them off. They were ambush predators, not fighters. See, father? All that scroll-worming in the royal library, mostly in search of Dragon lore were she honest, could come in useful in situations like these. Shouting, dancing like an excitable spider monkey and pelting the snake with rocks, Lia chased it off into the undergrowth.
“Come near my family again, Ra’aba, and I’ll do the same to you.”
Lia strutted down the trail, and promptly sliced her toe open on a sharp sliver of basalt.
Midday and early afternoon saw her taking shelter beneath a dead chagga tree, which bore a type of hard-shelled, bitter fruit good for throwing at windrocs or chasing off pestiferous monkeys, of which there seemed to be an endless supply. Hualiama peeled a poor-man’s-apple and ate it without great relish, despite the hunger snapping in her lean belly. The day’s sultry heat robbed her of appetite. Her tan limbs gleamed. Sweat trickled down her neck as her lungs laboured to expel the syrupy air. Oh for a cool breeze, or another waterfall!
Dangling her feet over the cliff edge, Lia gazed out over the pristine Cloudlands, imagining she had Dragon eyes and could see all the way to the Western Isles, hundreds and hundreds of leagues away, to places with evocative names like Naphtha and Ur-Tagga and Xorniss. Where would Ra’aba have sent her family? Would that her soul could have winged across that great void, the unknown, depthless expanse of deceptively puffy ochre clouds, to be with them. Did Shyana gaze to the horizon, mourning her daughter’s death? Did she feel how the beauty of infinite solitude engulfed Lia in waves of aching so intense, that each heartbeat threatened to become her last? Did the Island-World’s majesty both crush and elevate her spirit to exultation?
Here she crawled, an insignificant ant on the wall of the world.
Late that afternoon, when Hualiama crawled beneath a gnarled tree trunk so massive it stood four times her height, almost entirely blocking the trail, she found her waterfall. Thirty feet wide, it was utterly impassable.
A problem for tomorrow. Lia moved forward to lean into the spray, whispering, “Mercy, that’s delightful.” Extending her hands palms-up, she cupped handfuls of water and tossed them over her head and upper body, shivering at the chill pleasure. The suns lowering in the west beat pleasantly on her back.
Lia! Flicker dropped onto her shoulder.
Surprise almost pitched her into the hissing white flow. Lia wobbled; Flicker snatched at her hair and tore a good chunk out trying to pull her to safety.
Her face seemed stuck between a smile and a frown as she regarded the irrepressible dragonet, slowing her panting deliberately. Finally, Lia settled on, “You lovely little pest. Where’ve you been all day?”
I see your straw is useful for something, said Flicker, cleaning the strands off his paws. I was visiting my egg-mother and warren, thank you very much. They were worried about me, unlike your parents … ah, do you have any lemur intestines?
The dragonet looked so cute and contrite, Hualiama had to forgive him, even though she understood only one word in three. “Thanks for coming back, you little scamp. I missed you like I’d miss a mosquito in my ear. Where shall we roost tonight?” Cave here?
Flicker nodded. Through the water-that-thunders, flat-face. Follow me if you dare.
And he plunged into the flow with the facility of a trout fleeing the snap of a windroc’s beak.