On the third day after Ayafeeia left, the roc-riders attacked.
They came screaming out of the sky as the dragons were occupied dropping fire on stone-throwing machines that they later decided had been built solely to provide them with targets for their fire. The rocs raked two dragonelles across the back, tearing wing and ligament and sending them tumbling through the air into the Ironriders.
If the fall didn’t kill them, they were soon speared by the Ironriders.
Now it was the Ironriders’ turn to jeer.
The roc-riders stole the food they’d kept on ice on a high glacier. One lucky rider plucked a drakka and lifted off with her, carried screaming higher and higher as two dragonelles tried to pursue in vain. The roc dropped her, just to hear her scream as she fell, and Wistala cursed the eggs that had sheltered them.
They managed to avenge themselves on two roc-riders when Wistala suggested a tactic that had very nearly worked on her when a troll plunged out of the sky upon her. They buried two dragonelles in snow so they wouldn’t be seen, and then they fell on the riders as they rode through the pass. The dragons did better than trolls, though—they could use their wings to control their dives. When they struck the riders, rider and mount disappeared in a burst of blood, flesh, and feathers.
Takea returned that night with the top half of a beak, wearing it as a human would a helmet.
Now the sky and the heights belonged to the Ironriders. Wistala and what was left of the Firemaids had to keep clear of swooping roc-riders and their arrows.
“We could sneak away. Why do we hold this pass alone? Where are the men who would fight at our side?”
“They have troubles enough with the riders who are making it across the pass.”
“How long do we stay here?”
Wistala bristled. “Until they stop coming or we breathe our last.”
The Firemaids needed more than that, she decided. Each would lay down her life gladly if they guarded the mouth of a tunnel that had hatchlings at the other end. But the reasons for fighting here—how could she put them into words?
“I believe humans will never trust us unless we prove our loyalty to our word and their law by dying for it.”
“What’s human law to us?” a Firemaid asked, both nostrils and lips caked with blood and the marks of the desperate dagger-strokes of some Ironrider she’d finished off. “I say withdraw!”
A Firemaid muttered that they would be climbing out if they withdrew. There were no longer enough healthy dragonelles to carry the drakka.
“What’s dragon tradition to humans?” Wistala replied. “If we keep our word, do our duty, they’ll know they can rely on us in the future.”
“We should keep our word for ourselves, no matter what the humans think,” Takea said.
“A future we won’t live to see,” another replied.
“Maybe,” Wistala said. “No one knows. But every day we create a future. Our fight here creates a better one.”
“I still say they deserve these steppe-demons. Letting us die up here in the cold, alone. It’s their lands. I would not expect a bunch of dwarves to die protecting my tunnel.”
“The rest of you may go, if you wish,” Wistala said. “I’m staying here. I will prove it.” She tore off the brace on her wing, threw it down, and smashed it on an angled rock, breaking it anew.
“There,” she said through the pain. “I can’t fly off.”
Little Takea could take no more. She ran and stood before Wistala. “How do we live, Firemaids?”
“Together!” they responded.
“How do we fight?”
“Together!”
“Then how should we die?”
“Together!”
She organized all her Firemaids into pairs or trios. One would always keep watch for the roc-riders while the other dug sleeping holes in the snowdrifts or stole down into the pass looking for a loose horse or a lost dog to eat.
It was while watching the drakka melt snow for everyone to drink that Wistala had her idea.
A dam of ice and snow had built up on the southern slope. Snow exposed to the sunlight and warming spring winds was melting and running down into the pass, but as it passed into the shadows of ridges and other mountains, it froze again.
The mass created hung heavy in the mountains, an avalanche waiting to happen.
They tried making noise, for noise sometimes triggers an avalanche, they knew, but the loudest dragon roars had no effect on the ice-dam and the glacier of snow behind.Their cries brought satisfying sounds of alarm from the end of the pass.
Wistala studied it, remembering what Rainfall had taught her about bridges, loads, keystones, and so on. It seemed to her that the ice-dam resembled an upside-down bridge, with a line of rocks and boulders blocking it.
She waited for a storm to try her theory. As the blowing snow reduced the horizon to a few dragonlengths and turned the sky a smoky gray, they went to the base of the dam.
“If we can’t block the pass ourselves, maybe ice and snow will do our work for us. Ready?”
“Be sure to take off as it gives way.”
“If it gives way,” a Firemaid said. “But what about you?”
Wistala pointed with her tail-tip to the cliffside just to the left of the dam. “I’ll dash there.”
“Hope you’re a good dasher.”
“Together,” Wistala said.
They vented their flame across the base of the ice dam.
The ice and snow, or possibly rock, groaned. Wistala heard cracks.
Wistala remembered being caught in the tunnel as a hatchling with Auron. They’d battered their way out with their tails, Auron hurling himself against the ice with his body until it broke.
She turned, beat the rock with her tail, beat it until she smelled blood.
“More flame!” she gasped.
They vomited fire again. Running water turned to steam in the heat—
Krrrrrack!
A stone gave way.
The ice shifted, the whole mass moved perhaps a clawsbreadth.
Wistala held her breath, every nerve alert.
“Run, Wistala, it’s giving.”
She felt wingtips lash across her back as she hurried for the rocks. The ground slid beneath her feet.
Thunder in her ears, a roaring so loud that one felt it rather than heard it, engulfed her. She lunged, leaped, managed to cling to a fall of rocks at the base of the wall of rock.
Ice and snow roared down behind her, dragging her feet with them. She felt the ground pull at her—a strange sensation, not being able to trust the ground. Instinctively she opened her wings and tried to take off, but her broken wing just pulled against the lines and braces that held it to her body.
The flow dragged at her, its icy dust trying to choke her, but still she clung. Then she realized she was lost as well—tumbling, tumbling—and she curled her wings about her.
Then her breath was gone. Somehow she sensed which way was up and, heaving with every muscle, fought her way toward the surface. But the snow was so very heavy and she was cold and tired and broken, and oh so very sleepy . . .
She woke to a bright orange eye, found a great feathered roc staring down at her, its reins piercing its beak like a leathery mustache.
It had its claw on her throat, ready to rip out her neck hearts.
She was lying in the pass, but something was all wrong. She was at the wrong height, halfway up the sheer cliff on the south side. Then she realized that she rested on a mound of snow the size of one of the twin hills on Rainfall’s old estate.
Spirits and snowdrifts, they’d done it! She knew the weather at these heights—it would be full summer before the pass would be warm enough to melt all this down into the Ba-drink.
“It’s alive,” the rider called, in Parl, to a group of Ironriders behind. They wore baskets upon their shoes to allow themselves to walk on the snow.
“You. Hold still,” he ordered in Parl.
She wouldn’t be a prisoner again. She’d rather breathe her last in the clean mountain air than be flung into some new dungeon.
Wistala realized that only a thin layer of snow covered her body. She flexed her body, struck out with all the power in her cold-stiff tail, and a wave of snow flew out toward the bird.
As birds always do when startled, it flapped its wings and jumped back.
That was all Wistala needed. Her body stiffened and she spat flame—a thin stream, more a series of torfs than an actual stream of fire given that she’d been on short rations lately—striking bird and rider.
Both screamed and they flew off, the rider beating at the liquid fire across his saddle.
The Ironriders waddled comically, dropping the lines and chains they’d brought to drag her out of the snow.
Wistala felt too tired and cold to give chase. But shadows crossed the sun, shadows of dragons—
“Wistala, we are coming!” cried the Firemaids.
Drakka came shooting down the snowy slope, heads up, sii and saa tight against their sides, steering with their tails.
Roc-riders, drawn by the motion, dived and whirled, their riders firing arrows.
The drakka shot past her, flying like scaly arrows across the snow.
The Ironriders didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t run with the baskets on their feet, and they couldn’t move through the snow with the baskets off. One after another fell, knocked down by the drakka.