She climbed up onto the eggshelf. Jizara was matching herself against Mother’s tail-tip, standing up when it stood, rolling when it rolled, a prrum in her throat.
“Mother, I was hunting slugs, and—”
“Earth Spirit,” Jizara said. “You get any thicker, and your tail will disappear!” Jizara proudly displayed her long, lean tail, and she never tired of matching her extremities to those of her stumpier sister.
“Jizara, don’t tease. Wistala, you’re all latent wingbone, as I was, and short limbs are the stronger for it.” Mother, despite the more plentiful meals since the melt began, was breathing audibly from the effort of the tail game.
“Mother, the copper is after Auron.”
Mother stared, long and slow, out into the depths of the cave. “I’d hoped he’d left. Auron may kill him. Your father never knows when to back down either.”
“Maybe they’ll do each other in,” Jizara said. “We’ll have more food and a little quiet.”
“Every hatchling is precious,” Mother said. “There are few enough left, and it’s the rare drake who grows to dragonhood these days.”
“If there are fewer drakes, that means fewer songs sung to dragonelles,” Jizara said.
“Well, in the North—”
“Mother! Mother! Mother!” came a hatchling’s shout. “Others!
Assassins, dwarves, here in the cave.” Auron jumped clean to the egg shelf, his stripes hard and black against his skin and blood running from behind his crest. Wistala heard metal ring against stone somewhere in the cave, felt her scales rise.
Mother swept her tail around Wistala and her sister, putting her body between whatever approached and her daughters. “We are discovered?”
Auron turned this way and that, going in three directions at once. “They’re here. With spears, Mother.”
Mother looked out into the gloom of the cavern. “No! I’m faint with hunger, and the winter’s been so—”
Mother reached up with her long neck and put her mouth about a loose stalactite. She wrenched it free, and Wistala felt air move. “I hope you aren’t too big for this, my hatchlings. Auron, take your sisters and go to the surface. At once! Climb, my love, climb.” She shoved Wistala up the wall with her nose.
Wistala climbed toward the patch of shadow with the faintly new air flowing down from it.
Wistala looked down at the egg shelf, where chaos ruled. Jizara clung to Mother’s leg, all eyes and bristling scales and fluttering griff. Auron stood at the egg shelf, tail twitching, crest-shrouded eyes fixed on ranks of approaching mounds of metal and muscle, short-legged fellows with beards that glowed like fire. Had they drunk some latter-day dragonfire before charging into the cavern?
She almost lost her grip with her sii as she counted the numbers. Behind the dwarves, she saw what she took to be an exceptionally tall dwarf or broad man in black armor. The tall figure wore a winged helm and gestured with a broad-headed spear that sparked and glowed as though it had a life of its own. He pointed it toward the egg shelf, and dwarves bearing some kind of wood-and-metal contraption on their backs hurried up a broken stalagmite. With his other hand, he held the straining lines of a pack of hairy-backed dogs the size of ponies.
Mother, her head level with Wistala and imploring Jizara to release her grip, must have seen them, too. Wistala got a brief thought—Him! Gobold has sold us out!—before Mother reached down and picked Auron up by the base of his neck. She threw him into the air toward the hole. Auron twisted as he flew and struck next to Wistala at the opening. Wistala reached and held him as he found his grips. As he breathed, Auron’s ribs moved so fast, they were a blur.
Dwarven climbing poles struck the egg shelf with a klank!
“Climb! Auron, climb!” Mother called.
Jizara, we’re up here. Climb with us! Wistala thought, but her sister retreated behind Mother’s hindquarters as the first dwarf-helm appeared over the rim of the egg shelf. Jizara looked up at her, stupidly, not even recognizing her. Sister!
Scrring came the sound like an arrow in her ear. She saw blades flash silver in the lichen-light as they were drawn.
Auron drove his crest into her side, and the tenuous connection vanished. Wistala, up and away! came Mother’s last frantic thought, and with it a horrible, clawing fear that blinded and deafened. Wistala fled upward.
Ku! Ku! Kuuuuuu! came the war cries from below. The sound traveled through rock and ice.
Dead lichen, ice, and loose rock gave way, dropping onto Auron, who was following below. Vague flashes came through—Blood—spears—Wheel of Fire Drakossozh—Yellhounds! Jizara!
Death cries and madness pursued her up the shaft. Up she climbed, up until there were no more sounds echoing from below, up until sii and saa both burned and quivered and the hatchlings had to cling to each other with tail and mouth, up until blood-taste coated their tongues with each breath and the hammering in their neck hearts made their ears ache. Wistala pushed through bone and dead dry pine needles in utter darkness, no longer climbing but not walking either. The darkness unnerved her. Not even dragon eyes could pick out detail, and at every moment she feared the terrible sound of blades being drawn.
She fetched up against something cold and wet—an ice flow blocked the tunnel. She could still feel air moving from a crack at the top, a crack that could hardly fit her snout. What little remained of her ebbing strength vanished.
“Auron, we’re trapped,” she said, hardly able to get the words out. A last hope flickered: perhaps the dwarves and that tall wing-helmed man had been defeated. “We have to go back down. Perhaps Mother and Jizara—”
“No,” Auron said. Dully, she observed that he was hardly panting, though he moved stiffly. Of course, he was lighter, being scaleless. Auron sniffed at the clean, cold air coming in over the ice flow. “Fresh air. We’re almost there.”
“That’s why you don’t want to go back. Your thin hide—”
Auron shoved her aside. Her brother simply went mad. There was no other word for it. He began to pound the ice with his tail. Pieces, tiny pieces of ice compared to the mass, flaked off and slid down to the bones at the bottom of the tunnel. She wondered if this was the raging fighting fury that Mother said took over young drakes. He bit and clawed at the ice whenever he shifted position.
When his tail began to spray blood at each swipe, he spat at the ice. The spittle hissed as it struck, and it ran into fractures, raising a sharp odor of bat urine.
“Wistala, spit!”
“I’ve no fire yet—”
Excrement and excuses. It is melting the ice, she realized. She tried to squeeze her fire bladder behind her breastbone. Nothing.
“Spit, Wistala!”
“Can’t!”
Then she could see. A faint pink light came through the ice flow. It must be the light of the Upper World, the sun.
Two cracks ran up the ice flow, parallel and in a shape oddly reminiscent of the man with the spear’s winged helm. She pictured the helm at the base of the cracks—Something spasmed behind her breastbone, and she found she could spit. Found she could—she had no choice. Her tongue pressed itself against the roof of her mouth, and her jaw opened wide—
Out it came, until she felt as though her vertebrae from shoulder-pivot to tail-tip might be running up her neck and out her mouth. An orangish light filled the cave along with the acid smell, stronger than ever.
She collapsed, spent in an entirely new way.
Auron gathered himself, curled tight, and exploded toward the orange glow like a projectile from one of the dwarves’ war machines.
He broke through in a shower of yellow-white shards—
And disappeared straight over a ledge.
Wistala struck out from her shoulders, extended her neck even as his tail-tip whipped for a hold. She sank her teeth into it, tasted her brother’s blood in her mouth. His momentum dragged her forward, toward the ledge. Impossible distances stretched off in every direction, out, to either side.
Especially down. Her head went over.
A drop, a thousand times greater than that of the egg shelf, lay beneath. The vast distance seemed to reach up and touch her between the eyes. Her head swam. . . .
Her teeth, however, gripped all the tighter as her short legs found purchase. She arched her thick back, claws dug into ice, rock, and hardened snow, setting every haunch against her brother’s weight.
Auron found a grip, and his weight vanished. She didn’t release his tail, though, until he rolled beside her on the ledge.
The two hatchlings shivered against each other, panting in the thin air of the Upper World.
Chapter 5
Don’t think about this big, empty, howling chaos that is the Upper World, Wistala told herself for the beyond-countingeth time. Or how much you miss Mother, even her endless lessons. Or dwarves. Or eager, straining hounds. Don’t think beyond the next meal. Just find food, and then rest. Find food, and then rest.
They made it down the mountain, thanks to Auron. His light weight allowed him to test holds for her, and they’d come off the horrid, cold mountaintop and into a slightly less horrid, slightly less cold tree line, where Auron promptly scared away some feeding goats by leaping at them at first whiff. She had no luck hunting after that, and it was only after they developed a system where he’d drive game to her, or she to him, as his skin naturally changed color to match whatever he rested against, that they were able to eat.