Hualiama surveyed the prospect of sliding down his shoulder from a height of fifteen feet, and shook her head. “I’d break an ankle … no, wait. I might try your hind leg. Bend your knee, please.”
Gingerly, she walked along the row of spine spikes, before sitting on her rump and making the slide down to the bulge of his upper thigh, and thence his knee. After that, it was still a respectable hop down onto the arch of his hind paw, and at last to the ground. Lia stretched, groaning.
Grandion furled his wings with an even bigger groan, before curling up abruptly, his head tucked back toward his tail. “Wake me if something exciting happens.”
Ten seconds later, Hualiama turned around to speak, and found the Dragon sound asleep!
Hands on hips, she waggled an eyebrow at her co-conspirator, feeling daring–as daring as a certain dragonet, in fact. She had flown Dragonback! Hualiama was a rider of Dragons. Her vision darkened. Lia leaned over, trying to find a way to draw breath despite the feeling of bands of iron clamped about her ribcage. What was this? Slowly, the attack eased. Mercy. It had been a busy night–was it really not yet dawn?
She had not eaten since Ra’aba’s assault on the monastery, she realised.
* * * *
Hualiama woke up with a horrid jolt. Dragon! No, he was neither trampling her, nor standing over the royal ward with a toothy grin, considering how exactly he might turn five feet of Human girl into a between-meals appetiser.
Tucking into a handful of nuts drawn from her pouch, Lia considered their mutual madness. Oaths made between Dragon and Human? Aye, for evidently, ralti sheep danced upon the Blue Moon! And what of this inexplicable magical imperative which seemed to have seized them both by the throat and winged them off to an uncertain destiny? Had Grandion noticed her accidental use of Dragonish? Which brought to at least three the number of reasons he should summarily execute her with a blast of Dragon fire. She peered at Grandion from the corner of her eye. No, he was neither a single inch smaller, nor any less … Dragon. Mercy. Double mercy with huge fire-breathing serpents on top!
There would be no escaping this cave without him.
Grandion nigh filled his half of the cave, a slumberous mound of Dragonflesh clothed in gemstone raiment fit for a king. She snuck a little closer to examine the detail of his scales, shaking her head. How could she describe such a blue? Pearlescent? Mesmeric? Each scale on his flanks was the size of her two hands placed side by side, reducing to tiny, thumbnail-sized scales around his eyes. Lia felt as though she were gazing into the inner part of a gemstone which had inexplicably assumed the structure and form of draconic scale armour. She had a sense of falling inward into a hypnotic, perilous crystalline world. One could lose oneself in such scrutiny.
Fascination and Dragon fear. Aye. So had it ever been between Dragons and Humans. So it was with her now.
Lia drank sparingly from a trickle of crystal-clear water at the rear of the cave before shucking her blades and her belt with all its supplies. She owed it to Master Khoyal, let his soul fly upon the eternal winds, to complete her training. She would first limber up with a dance before moving on to the many forms of Nuyallith burned into her mind. Some were inexplicable or mystical. Ja’al had not yet transferred ninety of the lessons, but Lia already felt like a walking library of lore–or an ambulatory headache.
Grandion stirred in the late afternoon, when the heat pressed down as if intent upon smothering the Islands in a thick, sweltering blanket. A storm brewed out there. The eighteen league wide caldera generated so much ambient heat that Fra’anior Cluster never grew cold, but the heat also caused massive thunderstorms to boil around the Islands year-round, with a particular concentration in the storm season–which would arrive within the month, she realised. Ra’aba had been on the throne far longer than anyone would ever have imagined.
“Doesn’t a Dragon usually fly much faster than we managed last night?” Lia inquired.
The tip of the Tourmaline Dragon’s tail twitched twice, an indicator of irritation. “That was for my benefit, Human girl. Muscles long dormant must be reawakened. Toxins build up in the muscle tissues and joints, while the smaller arteries feeding the wing surface begin to calcify. Even