Ширли Мерфи - Nightpool

But suddenly heavy flapping filled the sky, and a coughing growl. The jackals were on them, dropping and snarling. Hoofbeats were pounding behind, loud on the stone as if they had just come up from softer ground.

“Run!” Pixen cried to Teb. “We’ll delay them.”

But Teb could not; his knife was slashing at a jackal even before he knew he had drawn it, for the creature had little Reeav in its mouth, shaking her. He slashed at its throat, then its face, but it would not let her loose. At last, with three foxes at its throat, it twisted in agony and let her go. Reeav staggered away. Mux tried to get to her, but the riders were all over them, all was confusion. A jackal grabbed Teb’s leg, tearing; then he felt himself snatched up by the shoulder as a horse shied against him and he was lifted and thrown across a saddle, facedown, so the saddle back jammed hard into his ribs and belly, knocking out his breath and searing him with pain. The horse swerved, and Teb revived enough to bite the rider’s arm and kick at him; he got a blow across his back that shoved him into the saddle again and made him go dizzy with pain. Then the horse was whipped to a gallop, and the pain was like fire in his middle.

*

The soldiers moved northward all night. Teb hurt so badly he wished he would die, and much of the time he was unconscious. He threw up twice, and the retching made searing stabs of pain. He didn’t know when they stopped, knew nothing very clearly until he woke the next day in broad daylight with someone shoving a waterskin at him.

He lay trying to understand where he was and why he hurt, and was not clear about anything. He was in some kind of a building made with logs set wide apart so sky and seashore shone between them. The logs were lashed together with chain. The thing was like a huge cage, and he was chained inside it.

He was in the dragon trap.

He pawed at the waterskin and turned to lift it, sending fire through his middle. He soon found he could lift no weight without pain. He managed to slide closer to it and drag it up on his chest, above the hurt, and sucked at it, spilling a good deal over himself, but satisfying his thirst at last.

He lay there all day, asleep, awake, then late in the day burning one minute and shivering the next. Someone brought him food, fried rabbit and hard bread, but he was too sick to eat. He begged for a blanket and was ashamed of begging. He slept and woke, and was conscious of little, until he woke and saw it was dark. Or nearly so, for the moon was there overhead, thin and bright—and then gone. The moon suddenly gone.

He thought it was his illness making him blind. But no, there was something—something there in the night, covering the moon. Something . . .

Then he could see the moon again, but the something was still there hovering in the sky low over the cage, reflecting moonlight on its pale silvery body that stretched out long and curving, on its immense wings that shimmered across his vision far broader than the width of the cage. He stared up at her, trembling. Immense she was, and wondrous, and though he should have been terrified, should have cringed away, knowing she could kill him, he was not afraid. He was filled only with wonder, with awe and with a longing he had never known and could not challenge or question. There was no fear. Only a strange, throat-tightening love that left him confused and shaking. She lifted away higher and grew smaller, passed across the moon again, then disappeared.

And still he trembled and stared at the night and could not sleep anymore. Long after the dragon departed, she still filled his mind, her gleaming wings and her huge, clear green eyes looking and looking at him.

Chapter 7

The dragon had awakened not many days before, in the mud of Tendreth Slew. She had been asleep for many years there, and she was the only singing dragon among the dozens of squat hydrus and common dragons that used the slew for concealment. When she woke and lifted her head from the muck to look around her, she saw no other like herself. She stretched her long neck up to look more carefully, and rivers of mud ran off her silvery scales. She blew from her nostrils in a shower of mud. Then she stood up with a sucking noise, and mud poured back into the hole she left. The other creatures stirred and moved away to give her room, so the whole slew writhed with their slithering.

She stared up into the dawn sky and opened her great red maw, and roared at sky and mountains and at the world in total. The mountains thundered her call in receding echoes. She pulled one clawed foot from the mire to paw at the chill air; then she climbed out of the slew onto the stone ledge beside it with a sucking pull and made her way along the escarpment until she reached a clear, fast spring flowing down out of the mountain and into the rock-edged lake. She slid in and swam, washing herself, rolling and blowing in the deep icy water, twisting down into the depths, then up again to break surface with sprays of foam.

She came out glistening, as pale and iridescent as a sea opal. She was no color and all colors, for her glinting sides reflected the colors around her: her belly coppery from the stone beneath her, her sides brown and green from the mountain, and her back mirroring the pale dawn sky just as her dragon’s mind mirrored the long, rich life of Tirror.

She stretched to dry herself, streaming water. She spread her wings on the wind and shook them so they shattered the light. She was as long as twelve horses, and slender, with a fork at the end of her tail, and two gleaming horns on her forehead. Her sharp fangs marched in two rows beside a forked tongue red as blood. Her eyes were green, though they could look azure or indigo, depending on her temper. She stared into the clouds above her, her mind filled with a thousand pictures, and she wanted to sing. But she would not sing here, alone. And then slowly she realized why she had waked. She felt the changes in her body, subtle as song itself and as compelling.

Her eggs were forming. Soon she must fertilize them. She felt the urgency to breed like a great tide, and she cried out a ringing call. Her eyes flashed, her body towered, rearing. Then suddenly she leaped skyward in an explosion of beating wings.

And if before she had been beautiful as she reflected the lake’s waters, now in flight she was like jewels of ice. She lifted on the thermals and spiraled upward, bellowing her clear call, filled with the sky’s freedom and with the thrill of her own power, and she headed north toward the highest, wildest peaks of Tirror to begin her search for a mate.

But was there any male left in Tirror? Had all the singing dragons but herself fled through the twisting ways into other worlds? Was she the last, all alone?

Then as she headed north she spied the army camped on Baylentha’s shore, and she dropped to look. But the soldiers did not cheer her as men of old would have done, before she went to sleep. These men cowered from her and brandished weapons, and that angered her. She dove at them, bellowing, and they ducked away and cried out, and some shot arrows at her. She dove at them, spitting flame, and drove away their horses, and left them huddled together as she swept away to more urgent business.

But something about the camp on Baylentha’s shore made her curious, and she returned several days later.

Now the shore was bare, so she circled and left, but still she was drawn to it, and the next time she came the soldiers were back, and now they were cutting trees and constructing something huge on the shore. They stood watching her this time with some strange urgency until she swept up away into the clouds.

Her curiosity drew her back again and again. She spent her days searching the mountains for a mate, then came to Baylentha late in the night, while the soldiers slept. Soon she knew what it was they built, and then one night there was bait in the trap, and she dropped low to see.