Would that work?
She hurried down to the river, gulped down mouthful after mouthful, felt her stomach swell until she became sick with the fullness. . . .
The water came back up easily enough, a little sour-smelling, thanks to her empty belly.
But it worked.
She filled herself even fuller, until it seemed as though she could hardly draw breath from the liquid in her stomach—dragon innards were built for gorging—and learned a lesson when it came back up of its own accord on the stairs.
She took in less for her third load and made it all the way to the top.
“I’ve got something for you, Father,” she said.
He opened a weary, bloodshot eye.
She cast about and settled on the central slab Father braced himself against when he tried to move. It had a gutter running down the center, perhaps designed to catch and hold rainwater? She hopped up onto the edge, and with a loudish belch almost filled half the trough with water.
Father sniffed. “Tala! You’re a miracle!” He lapped at the water. “You are your mother’s hatchling, no doubt about it,” he said on the second trip.
“This is doing me wonders,” on the third. All the gorging and retching were exhausting, but she pressed on.
As she filled her stomach a fourth time, she felt a little woozy; the climbs up and down the rock were trying. She needed a meal. Would fish live in water this rough?
It turned out they did. They liked to wait behind the bigger rocks, sitting in the calm, waiting for a meal to be swept to them by the current. But they scattered when she dived in after them and disappeared into the bubbling water.
She thought it over and tried steering herself through the current.
This was far trickier, but with a little practice, she found she could shoot into the calm waters with water-lids lowered and snap down a fish quick as thinking.
But if her stomach was digesting fish, it wasn’t helping Father. He had blood and scale to make up. The juicy fish would help. Weren’t they shiny little bags of water, after all?
She dived into the river upstream, and after a wild ride round the reversal at the knob—and a bloodied nose on an unexpected rock—she had five fish in her belly. She took her time climbing the steps.
Father was asleep. Was his breathing less labored? Hard to tell. Wistala decided against waking him for a meal; the fish just felt too good in her gorge. Besides, they’d give her strength for more fishing. When Father woke, she’d try a few trips with a belly full of fish.
Two days—and a countless number of trips with fish swallowed whole—later, Father wasn’t his old self, but he could reach the river on his own in order to drink and wash the clotted moss from his wounds.
They’d extracted the oversized spear—Father called it a highpoon and told her dwarven war machines fired it to weigh down a dragon and bring him to earth. At one point, he’d had two in him and was plunging toward the lake around the dwarves’ battlements, when luckily the second tore free and he could just fly with the other. . . .
“They got me on that great bridge between those towers of rock,” Father said as he spat gobs of fire onto the chain links, which Wistala pounded with an edged rock under Father’s instruction, feeling that her shoulders would give way long before the chain. “There are caverns big enough for a dragon to get in at them, but they had the war machines concealed in decorative galleries, all woodwork and flower beds and curtains. I was hit before I heard the roar of the chains. Clever blighters.”
Finally the links gave way, and Father drew the highpoon out his other side, where it projected from his scale—the barbs on it made any other kind of extraction impossible.
Wistala almost swooned during the gory extraction. How did Father manage the pain?
Flying was beyond him, of course. He crept ever so slowly down the knob, shuffling his sii and saa and keeping grip with three while one explored the next step. Wistala fretted as he moved—this was almost as bad as seeing him lying in a pool of his own blood. An honorable death after battle had a twilight dignity to it. Seeing her strong, confident father, lord of her home cave, reduced to a slug’s pace down the gentlest slope of this rock pile brought new anguish.
The trip back up took all afternoon, it seemed.
“I never knew there could be such a fight,” he said as the sun set behind fire-edged clouds.
The old condor still waited above, looking a little droopy. Wistala wondered if he was molting at the thought of his feast living on day after day. She liked his companionship, though, and brought him a whole dead fish she found washed up on the riverside.
The condor didn’t mind the ants.
“The Wheel of Fire?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Mother and Auron.”
Father bowed his head, nostrils shut. “I saw her. What happened to Auron?”
Wistala told him. The shouted warning . . . the elves chasing him . . . the story came slowly. She tried to give him mind-pictures but had to fill in the fuzzier parts with words.
“And here I thought he took after the grandsire on his mother’s side. That sounds like something my father would have done. And you, scales so thin they hardly keep out the raindrops, went on alone?”
“Yes.”
“You might have done better to have found a nook in the home cave and waited another year until you had your flame. A mouthful like you would be easy pickings for wolves, leave alone the hominids. But perhaps the wolves have been driven from these woods, too.”
“I wanted to find you. We’re all that’s left.” She didn’t— couldn’t—mention the copper and his betrayal. Father had grief enough.
“Perhaps,” Father said. “Some pair. A hatchling and a half-dead dragon. The hunt’s probably on already, you know.”
“In this wild country?”
“There’s no country too wild if there’s a wounded dragon down. I tried to confuse them by flying hard south and then circling around through cloud layer, but my wings gave out. An elf will pick up a piece of bird-gossip or those hounds will find me. That dragon-hunter will have a new piece of scale for his harness, and our line will go unavenged.”
“I’ll avenge it, Father, if it comes to that.”
“Were-oaths and corpse-curses are for drakes and dragons, daughter. Dragonelles get their vengeance by seeing clutches of eggs laid to take the place of the assassinated.”
“I told you that you should have left him be,” the condor said.
Father blew his nostrils out at the condor. “Only thing that’ll change the mind of a dragonelle of Irelia’s line is herself, Bartleghaff,” Father said.
“You know that old buzzard?”
Bartleghaff squawked: “Condor!”
“Know him?” Father snorted. “He’s my oldest friend.”
“Friend? You were waiting to eat him!” Wistala said to the condor.
“Of course he was,” Father said. “I wouldn’t want some stranger getting the best bits. Who better than an old skymate to serve the dragon-wake.”
“What a feast!” Bartleghaff said. “And my son’s got a hatchling of his own now, first year in the sky. Such a gobble we’d have, we’d all be too fat to fly for a week. You’d have been remembered fondly at every cliff-sit for a hundred years. We were gathering to see you off properly.” He fluffed his feathers again. “Till she came along.”
“For someone who dines on lips and vents, you offer complaints a plenty,” Father said. “That legendary politeness of your kind—if it ever existed—is on the wane as your years advance.”
“Tell me about the dwarves, Father. Why do you say they betrayed you?”
“They broke a bargain they struck with your mother. Strange, for of all the hominids, dwarves are the only ones who can be trusted to keep their word without crabbing. Serves us right for believing legends. Perhaps dwarvish honor, like so many of the other old truths, has been brought down by poisoned arrows.” He sent a significant glare Bartleghaff’s way.
“What was the bargain?” Wistala asked.
“It came from our need for a decent cave. Your mother and I had already seen our share of tragedy. For our first clutch, we were too high in the mountains and in too shallow a cavern. A bitter freeze took the eggs. Your poor mother. The next cavern had a seep of bad air, odorless, clinging to the floor. Again, no hatchlings stirring after the first weeks. I was inconsolable at that and gave up hope—all those years of searching wasted. While flying the southern reaches of these mountains, we came across a band of blighters, half of them hurt, and made an easy meal of them. While I chased the survivors off south, your mother nosed through their belongings for digestible metals.
“Up popped a dwarf. Your mother thought him well scarred from battle and a stout, strong sort, even for a dwarf. Now had I been there, I would have made an end to him, but your mother knew we were strangers to the mountains this far from the sea, and she conversed with him. He gave his name as Gobold of the Wheel of Fire clan.
“ ‘You’re unusually bold for a dwarf abovegrounds,’ your mother said.