actually touching a two-leg. By the First Egg, just wait until I tell my warren-mates!
Wonderingly, she said, “When you look at me like that, I could swear you’re trying to talk to me, little one. Are you talking? Do you like this?”
Flicker shifted restlessly. Enough. Remove your paw, scoundrel.
She jerked her hand back as he made a token snap toward her trespassing digits. She said, “Gently, my beauty.”
How do you survive with no Dragon hide? he wondered, awash in confusion and wonder. Aren’t you cold? Do you have belly-fires, like me? What is this water leaking from your eyes? What magic did you summon? Why did the fungus-faced one try to kill you?
She was looking around, taking in her precarious perch in the V between two branches, supported from beneath by the thickness of the secondary growth, which twined together beneath her body. Flicker moved to his pile of medicines and selected a leaf. She needed to eat at least a pawful to keep the infection at bay. Right. Since he was so brave, this should be easy.
* * * *
“No!” Hualiama flinched as the dragonet rushed toward her.
The movement jerked her right arm. She distinctly felt the bones grate together, a few inches above her elbow. A deep groan accompanied the blenching of her face. Fire spread in her stomach as fresh blood began to seep from one of the puncture wounds.
Eat, insisted the dragonet.
“Er …” Hualiama flopped back on the branch, which swayed and dipped alarmingly. Dancing dragonets–she chuckled to herself as the phrase crossed her mind–she was right near the end, a bird in her leafy nest. How a small dragonet had dragged her to safety, she had no idea, but she had the scratches and burn-marks from branches to prove what the miniature Dragon had achieved. “You want me to eat that concoction?”
It looked like something the dragonet had regurgitated.
Don’t you know what’s good for you, two-legs? said Flicker, flicking his eye-membranes in irritation. This is medicine for the pain.
Feeling too weak and dizzy to refuse the strangely insistent dragonet, Lia sniffed the mess being waved beneath her nose. Actually, it smelled rather agreeable, like one of Queen Shyana’s allegedly ‘uplifting’ or ‘invigorating’ herbal brews she swore by for all ailments.
“Can you–” she squeezed her eyes shut, mouthing a word which would have earned her a reprimand from one of her tutors back at the Palace. She began to sweat and shiver simultaneously as the pain swept over her. “I’m going crazy. Talking to a dragonet in my crazy bird-perch.”
Eat, chirped the dragonet, making the sign again. Eat.
Eat, she chirped back.
Fine, I’ll feed you, you useless … what did you just say?
Lia knew she was badly wounded. The song of her body was anguish, a counterpoint to the consuming grief over her family’s fate. King Chalcion was a proud, unbending man. This would be a dagger to his gut. As for Queen Shyana–she was sweet and accommodating, the person to whom Hualiama had always turned. She truly treated Lia as a daughter, unlike the King. Should she be ungrateful for her position in the royal household? No. But the royal life was not all blossoms, as the Islands saying went.
The dragonet’s paw touched her lips. The animal fed her patiently, pawful by pawful, as Lia forced herself to swallow. Perhaps it thought she was a wounded hatchling? She had never imagined animals could care like this. There was something deeply peculiar about being tended by a dragonet, she felt, sinking back against her bough-bed, the type of impossible magic often served up in dreams. Yet, only reality could hurt this much. Lia spied on the creature as it worked. Fussy little thing, deft of paw and as nervous as a wild rajal kitten. Clearly undecided on a choice between two different mounds of herbal mush, the dragonet bit its little forked tongue exactly as her second-youngest brother, Elki, liked to do when he studied with the royal tutors. The dragonet chirruped to itself before hopping over to examine her broken arm. Quite the little physician. She had no doubt of its intelligence.
A monstrous lassitude swept over her Island like a sinister thunderstorm enveloping Fra’anior. The howl of the tempest sang her sorrow, while the jagged bolts of lightning represented pain, searing her body again and again. Even when Lia lay unmoving, it hurt to breathe.
Later, among her delirious dreams, she felt water spilling down her cheek. Lia opened her mouth instinctively, parched. Was it raining? Or