and wood smell as he did so and was glad they sat in the open air. The Great Kaan’s enormous body, more than one hundred and twenty feet from snout to tail, was stretched out along a contour of the slope on which they rested, overlooking the tarnished idyll of Herendeneth.
The small island, no more than a mile and a half wide and two long, lay deep within the Ornouth Archipelago, which basked under the warm sun of the Southern Ocean off the north-eastern tip of Calaius, the Southern Continent. It was a perfect mix of lush green slopes, waving beech groves and spectacular rock faces surrounding a shallow mountain peak on which stood a great stone needle, monument to the long-dead of an ancient magic. But the perfection had been scarred for ever by battle and the death of innocence.
Sha-Kaan had positioned his head so that he could see both Hirad and down the slopes to the groves, graveyard terraces and gardens. Beyond them were the ruins of the once proud house of the Al-Drechar, now devastated by a magic that had threatened the entire Balaian dimension. His left eye swivelled to fix the barbarian warrior with an unblinking stare.
‘Are my scales an irritant to you?’ he rumbled.
‘Well they aren’t the most ideal cushion,’ said Hirad.
‘I’ll have someone rub them smooth for you. Just point out those which require attention.’
Hirad chuckled and turned to look into the Great Kaan’s startling blue eye which was set into a head almost as tall as he was.
‘Your sense of humour’s coming on, I see,’ he said. ‘Still a long way to go, though.’
Sha-Kaan’s slitted black pupil narrowed. ‘One roll and I could snap your frail body like a twig.’
Hirad felt the humour in his mind like tendrils of mist on the breeze. There was no doubt the dragon had mellowed during their enforced stay on Herendeneth. In times past, he might have made that comment with both sincerity and intent. Still, joke or not, it remained true.
‘Just being honest,’ said Hirad.
‘As am I.’
They fell silent. It had been a long time coming, getting on for six years, but Hirad felt he could now describe Sha-Kaan as a friend. He had likened his relationship to the dragon to an apprenticeship. Ever since he’d agreed to become the Great Kaan’s Dragonene, so giving the dragon a life-sustaining link to the Balaian dimension, he’d been the lesser partner in an unequal alliance. Although the benefits of direct contact and support from a dragon were obvious, throughout the time they’d known each other, the awesome creature, secure in his mastery and power, had felt he had nothing to prove to the human. Hirad had felt absolutely the reverse.
But the inequality had lessened during Sha-Kaan and his Brood brother Nos-Kaan’s long exile in Balaia. Locked in a foreign dimension by a violent realignment of dimensional space and his home lost to his senses, Sha-Kaan had become aware of his mortality as his health slowly suffered. And Hirad believed that his unflinching loyalty to the Kaan dragons had proved that he was far more than a glorified servant but was a true friend. It seemed that at last Sha-Kaan concurred with that view.
Hirad’s attention was caught by movement down on the terraces. A woman walked from behind a small tree-studded grotto and knelt
by a beautiful array of flowers on a small mound of carefully tended earth. She was mid-height, with a full figure, her auburn hair tied back with a black ribbon. She plucked some weeds from the bed and Hirad saw her nipping the dead-heads from some of the taller fronds whose large yellow blooms blew in the gentle warm breeze.
As always when he saw her, Hirad’s heart thudded a little harder and his mood dipped, sadness edging into his mind. To an untutored eye, the woman might have been simply enjoying the beauty she had created. But she was Erienne, who was enduring pain beyond comprehension, because beneath the bed lay the body of her daughter, Lyanna.
Lyanna, whom The Raven had come to save; whose five-year-old mind couldn’t contain the power within it; and whose uncontrolled magic threatened to destroy Balaia. Lyanna, who had been allowed to die by the very people Erienne had trusted to train her and so allow her to live.
And that last was something Hirad found impossible to really understand; even though during his half-year on Herendeneth he’d had plenty of opportunity to work it out. After all, two of the four