Another swipe splintered the rock beside her thigh. Lia was up, sprinting, screaming as she ran for her life. A massive shadow sprang away from the cliff face. A wing swept down ahead of her. Lia’s nose smacked into a hard, leathery surface. She bounced straight into a Dragon’s paw, which flattened her with irresistible power.
Dragon-thunder reverberated against her eardrums, “How dare you run from me?”
An Island stood atop her back, three rock-hard digits crushing her shoulders, ribs and thighs into the stone. The vast rasp of the creature’s breathing filled her world. Lia distinctly felt the heat of its breath wash over her back, but her world had reduced to a simple need: oxygen. Only that. The night became blacker as her lungs heaved against the impossibly massive compression of a Dragon’s grasp.
A wheeze escaped her lips. “Please …”
The Dragon spat, “Please what?”
“Can’t … breathe.”
“As if you deserve another breath, trespasser.” However, the paw did lift, if only an inch.
Her heart rattled painfully up near her throat, a mouse thrashing in a steel trap. She could not see much from her position, but Lia sensed something of the size of this predator. The Dragon’s talons felt as thick as her thighs, and terminated in foot-and-a-half blades visible beyond her nose. By the timbre of his voice, she imagined a young male Dragon, not a fully-grown adult, although she had no way of knowing how she arrived at this conclusion.
People did not just sit down to lunch with Dragons.
Again, the hot, enigmatically redolent breath stirred her hair. In a growl that turned the pit of her stomach into a bowl of quivering prekki-fruit mush, the Lesser Dragon rumbled, “You dare to live on holy Ha’athior, little Human? Tell me why I shouldn’t give you a short flight from a great height?”
Monstrous irony! A bleak, chopped-off laugh fell from her lips. Hualiama shuddered as the terrible grip intensified, grinding her jaw against the rock. Somewhere behind her, anger throbbed in the Dragon’s belly, the same fires she heard inside Flicker, only a hundred times larger. His hold was so powerful, Lia could not even turn her head to gaze up at him. All she knew was an awesome voice a mere foot from her quivering back, rich and deeply resonant. So noble. So formidable, and so utterly alien to her experience, vibrating right through her body as though her very bones thrummed to his prodigious tune. How many times had Lia unknowingly flattened an ant beneath her heel? This Dragon could do the same, should he so choose.
“Speak!”
“I-I’m s-so awfully sorry o mighty Dragon,” she babbled, “someone else threw me down this cliff just recently and that’s why I’m here a-a-a–” she tried to halt the chattering of her teeth “–I’m laughing because I’m so terrified, mighty Dragon, and I know you probably think I’m insane but I’m not, and–”
“Silence!”
Lia tasted blood in her mouth from biting into her lip.
“Control your tongue’s flapping, girl,” he snarled, in a tone that did anything but help. “Pray you give truthful answers, or I swear your life shall be spilled this night!”
Four tries later, she managed to breathe, “Aye.”
He said, “Which Dragon threw you down here? How did you survive?”
“I always wanted to meet a Dragon, but not quite like this,” Lia ventured, speaking her thoughts aloud. “Um … I mean, it wasn’t a Dragon at all. A man tried to murder me, before throwing me off his Dragonship.”
“Who?”
“The man who’s now the King, I suppose–Captain Ra’aba. He–”
“Ra’aba!”
A baffling stress on the word, a crack of real thunder right above her back. At once, Hualiama understood that this Dragon knew exactly who Ra’aba was, and … hated him? Disapproved? There were so many nuances in the way her captor bit off that single word. What did it mean?
The claws loosened slightly. “Why are you so important, girl, that Ra’aba wanted you to fly into the Cloudlands? Who are you?”
“I’m Hualiama, the–”
“–adopted Princess of Fra’anior,” finished the Dragon.
Great leaping Islands! Her father’s fears, given voice. Icy claws clamped her belly as though the Dragon had seized a pawful of her entrails. King Chalcion had always claimed that the Dragons knew far more about Human dealings than they let on. If this monster knew who she was–a no-account royal ward of the Human royal family–then what else did he know? Were the Dragons secretly meddling in Human affairs and politics, as everyone seemed to ‘know’ but could never prove?