Fyria’s sobs from the corner betrayed what they all knew. Stiffly, Lia retrieved the fallen sword. She wondered if Ra’aba’s stroke had chipped chunks of bone off her spine. Her flesh flapped loosely, slapping against her back with a wet, plopping sound. Now, the pain roared through her like a hunting Dragon bellowing his paralysing challenge. Whiteness crashed over her vision. Lia pressed against the wall to keep from falling. Stand. Lock the knees. Fight!
She turned to face Ra’aba, despite the nadir of pain devastating her body. She raised her blade with a supreme effort. Lia hissed, “I’m ready.”
The Roc nodded, raising his blade to his forehead in an ironic salute to her bravery. He said, “Perhaps it is better this way.”
Lia stumbled into the attack, swinging her blade in looping blow, so sluggish that it seemed she fought underwater. Captain Ra’aba had no such difficulty. Sidestepping adroitly, he punched his left fist into her stomach.
His hand clasped a dagger.
The pain cut her in half. It felt as though her spine had been severed, for Lia lost all feeling in her legs. Only Captain Ra’aba’s iron grip held her upright, folded over the impaling blade. The sword clattered to the floor. Her lungs heaved for air. With each breath pain shot up her spine and tore into her skull like a blood-frenzied Dragon’s claws.
“Foolish girl,” he said.
She wheezed, “Why?”
Ignoring her, Ra’aba nodded at two of his troops. “You two. Throw this piece of trash overboard.”
His voice echoed as though he had shouted down a darkening tunnel. She had to move, to speak, but she was powerless. Lia knew she had to save her family. How odd, an inner voice said. Her life was not meant to end like this. As the Captain dragged her toward the doorway, spitting furiously at his unwilling soldiers, she met Fyria’s tear-filled eyes. The Princess must have thought being hauled out of the Palace in chains was the worst imaginable fate.
A brutal education.
Outside the cabin, the warm, fragrant winds of her beloved Fra’anior ruffled her hair. The Island-World seemed ablaze in fresh and miraculous colours, as though a Dragon’s breath infused all with mysterious wisps of white-golden fire, and in the slowing of time between her heartbeats, Hualiama understood not only that there was magic in the world, but that it pervaded everything she perceived, touched and smelled. The taste on her tongue was its fiery signature. She breathed, and an inrush of fire seared her spirit, yet conversely, brought an unexpected sense of serenity. The fire cleansed without consuming, a touch of love rather than torment. Was this a memory, or a fragment of insight garnered as her soul readied itself for an eternal flight?
Inanely, Lia realised that the soldiers had torn her headscarf away. She was improperly dressed.
The Roc lifted her five feet and two inches frame with ease. As he manhandled her toward the safety railing which lined the gantry beneath the Dragonship’s hundred-and-fifty-foot hydrogen balloon, Lia saw the unmistakable profile of Ha’athior Island’s double volcanic cone abaft their starboard beam. Ahead and several miles below lay a tiny side-volcano, nestled against its parent like a Dragon hatchling taking comfort against an enormous mother’s flank. After that? Crimson-tinged Cloudlands lapped unbroken from the Islands to the horizon’s skirts, a deathly carpet clothed in immeasurable, brooding majesty.
Strange. She had always wanted to experience Dragon flight.
The touch of cool metal against her back provoked a sudden, final outpouring of strength. Reaching behind her, Hualiama caught her long braid in her fingertips.
“Any birthday wishes, little Lia?” chuckled Captain Ra’aba.
“Rot in–” she inhaled sharply, choking on blood “–a Cloudlands hell.” Reaching up, Lia jabbed her three-inch long, razor-sharp hairpin into his windpipe, several inches below his left jawbone.
He wheezed, “You …”
As Ra’aba recoiled, the flailing of his arms tumbled her over the edge. Lia screamed endlessly as she fell through the ruddy beams of a perfect Fra’aniorian suns-set.
Chapter 2: Flicker
WHEN A SCREAM split the early evening sky, a dragonet lurking nearby almost spilled his mouthful of lemur intestines. What? He hated to be distracted from the spoils of his hunt. His green eyes narrowed against the glare of the sky-fires, the eyes of the Great Dragon which seared the world with their unrelenting gaze. One of those two-legged ground-creepers was trying to fly? Loops of grey intestines dangled either side of his jaw as he gaped at this spectacle. The creature thrashed its spindly, useless appendages as it plummeted from one of their fat flying balloons.