in her fifteen and a half summers of life, Lia copied the Dragon. She caught a whiff of rancid meat mingled with a far more redolent, intriguing spiciness of vanilla and cinnamon, and the sulphurous smoke of his fires. The odour made her head spin. Hualiama sighed wordlessly, and giggled as the Dragon sighed in concert with her. Hypnotic and inveigling, his eye-fires matched her soul’s febrile ardour blaze for blaze.
He blinked, breaking the connection.
Grandion growled, “This is impossible. I–I can’t fathom these fires.” Turning again to gaze at the starry heavens, he added, “It takes the absence of stars to truly appreciate their beauty. In the same way, I feel you have been absent from my life all these years, Hualiama.”
“Wow, you sound old.”
His laughter brought billows of smoke forth from his nostrils. “I’m a juvenile Dragon, like you, only I’m four years older–nineteen summers of age. And, sixty-five feet is no great size for a Dragon.”
“Big enough when you could probably swallow me sideways down your gullet.”
“Tempting?” He pretended to consider eating her, before chuckling, “Nay, Human girl. I have pondered your proposition, and I find in it a fatal flaw.”
Lia ventured, “You don’t know where Ianthine is, mighty Dragon?”
“The Maroon Dragoness lives in the northern Spits.”
“Ianthine would liquefy your brains and suck them out with a straw?”
“Possibly. That’s another problem. No,” his forepaw rose before he evidently thought the better of tapping her on the shoulder, “the fundamental issue is that no Dragon would deliver such information to a third party. You have to ask Ianthine in person. It’s an unwritten law in Dragon culture–we have many such unwritten codes, unfortunately.”
“So I must fly my non-existent Dragonship into the most dangerous airspace in the Island-World, bar the Rift storm, to inquire of a mad Dragoness who my father might be?”
Grandion’s jaw yawned open, giving the cringing girl a fine close-up of his gleaming white fangs. It was a Dragon smile, she realised belatedly. If only she could stop prattling away and calm her thoughts, which bubbled in her brain as though liquid lava pooled there. Was this Dragon fear? Or something even more visceral?
He rumbled, “I swore an oath.”
Gazing into the turbulent fires of the Dragons’ eye as though she wished to penetrate his very soul, Lia suddenly grasped an inkling of what he meant. No. He could not. She had thought the same, but never seriously, because no sane Dragon would ever consider it. Yet, the longer Grandion regarded her, the more convinced she became that her irrational thought might not, in fact, be quite so irrational after all.
Hualiama whispered, “Dragons possess a magic of concealment, do they not?”
“Especially Blues,” he clarified.
“So, hiding a Human would be how difficult, exactly?”
“Trivial. I hope you are not thinking what I am not thinking, Princess.”
“Er … of course not. I would never dream of thinking what you are not thinking. We are perfectly agreed on not thinking … um. That.”
A brittle silence stretched between them.
Grandion said, very carefully, “I am still not thinking the unthinkable, Hualiama. One must certainly not think about such taboos, for what is worse–to be an oath breaker or a taboo breaker?”
“Yet here a Human girl stands upon Ha’athiorian soil, conversing with a Dragon.” A hoarse chuckle broke past the tightness in her throat. “You aren’t much of a respecter of rules, are you, Grandion the Tourmaline Dragon?”
He roared his laughter until the ground shook beneath her, and his paw had to rescue her from a minor avalanche he had instigated. What panic his touch sparked! While a curl of flame heated her cheeks, Hualiama was more surprised to sense the surging of the magical insight Master Jo’el had begun to teach her during their return from Ya’arriol Island. For a moment as brief as a star’s twinkling, she saw him. Into him. She beheld the furnace-heart of Grandion’s Dragon soul, potent and noble and true. Yet she caught also an intoxicating whiff of treachery, darker currents of memory and experience that eddied amongst the purer light …
Grandion was there. A being of pure white flame intercepted her intrusion into his spirit. Hualiama sensed his shock and confusion; it ejected her as surely as if he had cuffed her with his paw. A physical shudder ran the length of his body. And when he spoke, it was with a levity that failed to disguise the inner disquiet Lia saw so clearly.
“I see that you remember my insults as well as any Dragon might,” said he.