Chapter 17 - A Dragon's Oath

ON Her THIRD strike of the spark-stone, the fuse caught. “Take cover!” Lia yelled, even though she had already warned Grandion four times. His muffled laughter chased her into the depthless night.

Although only the tiny pinpoint of the White moon was visible in the sky and enormous Iridith was hidden behind Ha’athior’s looming bulk, there was plenty of ambient light to help Lia traverse the cliff. She hurried with the zest of someone who knew a large volume of highly explosive hydrogen gas was about to ignite. Scrabble for bushes and handholds. Keep the feet moving, but take each step with care. Wish for wings that could bear her aloft if she took just one misstep …

How long was that fuse? Was Master Jo’el correct about the five minutes? She waited.

When it came, the detonation was disappointing.

Thump. Just a dull concussion conducted through the ground to her feet, although Lia did see a flash of light briefly illuminate the volcanic cone to her right hand. Dragonets? Lia paused in surprise. Hundreds of dragonets lined the volcano’s rim to watch proceedings. How did they know?

She turned. Nothing.

“Oh, Islands’ sakes …” Lia’s voice trailed off.

First, there came a sharp cracking sound as though lightning had struck from within the Island. Then, a deep groan, as if a mile-high door had been forced open for the first time in millennia. And now, a roar as a piece of Ha’athior Island slipped away from the mainland, sluggishly at first, but the noise rapidly escalated into a thunder that rolled away over the Cloudlands until it was lost in that immensity.

Flying ralti sheep! Lia dived beneath an overhang as a cascade of pebbles pinged her head and shoulders, followed by a few larger boulders which narrowly missed her feet as they tumbled past.

After that, the stillness shrieked against her ears. Hualiama listened for a final crashing lower down the Island, but perhaps the distance was too great. Silence. No Orange Dragons nosing about, investigating the landslide. Right. She scrambled to her feet. Time to see what trouble she had wrought.

Hopefully, a great deal. But when she reached the old avalanche site, it was to voice an involuntary wail of despair.

She had buried him!

Hualiama surveyed the destruction with mounting horror. A hundred feet away, she saw a darker smudge that she took for a sign of the blast-fire. Bushes still smouldered there, but below, the cliff-side had been carved away, leaving naked rock. But where was Grandion? Surely, he should emerge from the tunnel smiling and carolling his joy to the heavens? Then, she heard a muffled roar. Alive! He was somewhere beneath the rubble!

Before she knew it, Lia screamed across at the dragonets, Help me! There’s a Dragon, buried here. They looked on as, with trembling hands, she shinned down a vine to the level on the near-vertical slope where she thought she might find the Tourmaline Dragon, tracking the sound of his voice and the faraway scrape, scrape of his paws. Boulders, sand and other rubbish had collapsed into a crack here, she saw. The explosion had brought the cliff down on Grandion’s head–or not quite on his head, judging by the racket he was making.

Drawing one of her forked daggers, Lia hacked off the vine below the level of her feet and then tied the end firmly about her waist. Did she care about prowling Dragons? Nay. Living atop an active volcano meant that earth tremors and landslides could be bought a dozen for a brass dral.

Having freed both hands, she began to dig.

Immediately, two reds whizzed over to chatter at her in amazement.

Two-leg thing make dragonet warren? inquired the first.

Crazy creature far from home, snickered the second. Crazy-no-brain. Play game?

Being accustomed to a particular dragonet’s name-calling, Hualiama only smiled at them, mindful to keep her teeth covered by her lips. There’s a Dragon trapped beneath this rubble, little ones. Will you help me dig for him?

The reds chorused, No dig warren?

No, I’m playing a game to find a Dragon. Can you hear him under there? Why don’t you bring your friends to play?

Chirping excitedly, the dragonets began to burrow into the side of the cliff with the alacrity and enthusiasm of a pair of rabid weasels. In seconds, another dozen dragonets joined them. Dirt began to spray about. Boulders shifted. The dragonets took turns to tease and castigate each other. A minute or two later, Hualiama estimated that she had to have five hundred eager little helpers, their paws blurring as they dug, covering each other in dirt and picking up bushes to drop them off the cliff, crying, Beware! Beware! in shrill little voices when they undermined a boulder and rolled it away.

You’re marvellous! What wonderful helpers! Lia cried, ignoring at least ten pairs of paws pinching at her skin, trying to work out what manner of strange animal she might be.

Chaos. She considered the scene, laughing. The dragonets nearest her started laughing as well. Soon the entire cliff was covered in dragonets laughing for no other reason than the fact that the dragonet next to them was laughing. They sounded like a menagerie stuffed with giggling, squawking parakeets.

Lia dug with all of her strength, her heart suddenly pounding with a wild, uncontainable hope.

She must save the Dragon.

But ten or fifteen of the most tortuous minutes of her life passed by before suddenly, six feet from her right hand, a huge, scaly blue paw punched free of the dirt and stone. It withdrew underground.

“Oh, please, be alright … Grandion?”

Lia was yelling into the dark hole when the incline beneath her feet heaved, sending her into a helpless, bruising tumble down the steep slope before the vine snapped taut. She fetched up against a large granite boulder. Nearby, rock and stone buckled and cracked. Clinging to her vine, Hualiama caught her breath. With the resounding thunder of a Dragon’s challenge, Grandion burst free from his confinement, bellowing and bugling his joy until echoes cascaded from the opposing mountainsides, and the startled dragonets took off in a flock to begin a celebratory aerial dance.

From the tips of his talons to the massively spiked crown of his head, Grandion was what the scrolls failed so miserably to capture, an awesome living creature of fire and magic. It seemed inconceivable that a beast of his stature could possess a sleek, feline grace, but as the Dragon stretched his neck to gaze at the stars, and arched his spine with a deep groan that bespoke irrepressible delight at being freed from his bondage, he seemed wreathed in a mantle of stark and terrible splendour, far surpassing Lia’s wildest imaginings. Her chest hurt. Lia’s scalp crawled with a sensation of expansiveness.

Mercy! What had she loosed upon the Island-World?

Then, the Dragon’s muzzle turned, seeking her out. A crystalline eye-jewel, blazing with Dragon fire, fixed upon the Human girl with a potency that struck her speechless. She had never felt so very small. Mighty as he was, not even Amaryllion had mesmerised her so profoundly. This was different, a tempestuous song of magic and elation and no small tremor of fear as she gazed back at the Island-World’s ultimate predator, and yet her heart sang unbridled.

Grandion. She knew him, and he knew her, and it was a connection so exquisite and unending, Lia thought she might explode in a puff of bliss.

“What magic is this?” he whispered.

“None I know,” Lia stammered. “Oh, my soul … I feel … strange.”

With great nobility, the Dragon bowed his neck until the tip of his muzzle almost brushed her stomach. “I thank thee for redeeming my life, Human girl.”

By rights, the Dragon should execute her on the spot for standing upon the holy Isle. Though terror reigned supreme in her being, Hualiama’s tiny hand rose to touch his muzzle, sparking a palpable frisson in the Dragon’s body. Grandion’s belly-fires roared into life as if she had applied the bellows to stoke a furnace, only the blaze melted her own soul. Lia laid her cheek against his; so warm, so alive. There was nothing cool or reptilian about him. The complex beat of his hearts defied her comprehension, bespeaking ebullient storms of emotion coursing through the Dragon. And Lia wept as she had never known a person could weep, for gladness and wonder and the strangeness of a mystery which cocooned their shared existence at this moment, for the white-golden fire which gilded his muddied bulk in tongues of living fire, and for the knowledge that all of what she knew of the world, should be cast upon the pyre.

Once, the Ancient Dragons had raised the Islands from volcanic ashes. Newness rose from those world-shaping fires, sculpting places where creatures could live and love and thrive. So she felt now, poised upon the rim-wall of the unknown, about to dive into her future.

“O Dragon,” she breathed at last, “I tremble at thy presence.”

Thou … he gulped, and heaved such a great exhalation that it blasted particles of dirt off Hualiama’s body. Grandion’s muzzle withdrew; without warning, he then pressed forward eagerly, nostrils a-flare, to snuffle her scent deep into his lungs.

Terror and glory!

Acting on an impulse alien to anything she had experienced in her fifteen and a half summers of life, Lia copied the Dragon. She caught a whiff of rancid meat mingled with a far more redolent, intriguing spiciness of vanilla and cinnamon, and the sulphurous smoke of his fires. The odour made her head spin. Hualiama sighed wordlessly, and giggled as the Dragon sighed in concert with her. Hypnotic and inveigling, his eye-fires matched her soul’s febrile ardour blaze for blaze.

He blinked, breaking the connection.

Grandion growled, “This is impossible. I–I can’t fathom these fires.” Turning again to gaze at the starry heavens, he added, “It takes the absence of stars to truly appreciate their beauty. In the same way, I feel you have been absent from my life all these years, Hualiama.”

“Wow, you sound old.”

His laughter brought billows of smoke forth from his nostrils. “I’m a juvenile Dragon, like you, only I’m four years older–nineteen summers of age. And, sixty-five feet is no great size for a Dragon.”

“Big enough when you could probably swallow me sideways down your gullet.”

“Tempting?” He pretended to consider eating her, before chuckling, “Nay, Human girl. I have pondered your proposition, and I find in it a fatal flaw.”

Lia ventured, “You don’t know where Ianthine is, mighty Dragon?”

“The Maroon Dragoness lives in the northern Spits.”

“Ianthine would liquefy your brains and suck them out with a straw?”

“Possibly. That’s another problem. No,” his forepaw rose before he evidently thought the better of tapping her on the shoulder, “the fundamental issue is that no Dragon would deliver such information to a third party. You have to ask Ianthine in person. It’s an unwritten law in Dragon culture–we have many such unwritten codes, unfortunately.”

“So I must fly my non-existent Dragonship into the most dangerous airspace in the Island-World, bar the Rift storm, to inquire of a mad Dragoness who my father might be?”

Grandion’s jaw yawned open, giving the cringing girl a fine close-up of his gleaming white fangs. It was a Dragon smile, she realised belatedly. If only she could stop prattling away and calm her thoughts, which bubbled in her brain as though liquid lava pooled there. Was this Dragon fear? Or something even more visceral?

He rumbled, “I swore an oath.”

Gazing into the turbulent fires of the Dragons’ eye as though she wished to penetrate his very soul, Lia suddenly grasped an inkling of what he meant. No. He could not. She had thought the same, but never seriously, because no sane Dragon would ever consider it. Yet, the longer Grandion regarded her, the more convinced she became that her irrational thought might not, in fact, be quite so irrational after all.

Hualiama whispered, “Dragons possess a magic of concealment, do they not?”

“Especially Blues,” he clarified.

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“So, hiding a Human would be how difficult, exactly?”

“Trivial. I hope you are not thinking what I am not thinking, Princess.”

“Er … of course not. I would never dream of thinking what you are not thinking. We are perfectly agreed on not thinking … um. That.”

A brittle silence stretched between them.

Grandion said, very carefully, “I am still not thinking the unthinkable, Hualiama. One must certainly not think about such taboos, for what is worse–to be an oath breaker or a taboo breaker?”

“Yet here a Human girl stands upon Ha’athiorian soil, conversing with a Dragon.” A hoarse chuckle broke past the tightness in her throat. “You aren’t much of a respecter of rules, are you, Grandion the Tourmaline Dragon?”

He roared his laughter until the ground shook beneath her, and his paw had to rescue her from a minor avalanche he had instigated. What panic his touch sparked! While a curl of flame heated her cheeks, Hualiama was more surprised to sense the surging of the magical insight Master Jo’el had begun to teach her during their return from Ya’arriol Island. For a moment as brief as a star’s twinkling, she saw him. Into him. She beheld the furnace-heart of Grandion’s Dragon soul, potent and noble and true. Yet she caught also an intoxicating whiff of treachery, darker currents of memory and experience that eddied amongst the purer light …

Grandion was there. A being of pure white flame intercepted her intrusion into his spirit. Hualiama sensed his shock and confusion; it ejected her as surely as if he had cuffed her with his paw. A physical shudder ran the length of his body. And when he spoke, it was with a levity that failed to disguise the inner disquiet Lia saw so clearly.

“I see that you remember my insults as well as any Dragon might,” said he. “Nay, I am a rebel through and through. I like you, little Human. So, we’re definitely agreed not to think about this?”

“I’d think even less about it if I could return briefly to the monastery to collect a few unnecessary items,” said Hualiama, smiling through the nausea churning in the pit of her stomach. Oh, flying ralti sheep, what had she just promised him–promised a Dragon? She was mad. Set aside the magic raging between them, she was off-the-Islands, loopier than an overexcited dragonet, mad! “Will you wait for me?”

“And stink like a cesspit before my benefactress? I think not.”

With that, the Dragon snatched Lia up. His forepaw covered her body from her neck to her knees.

“G-G-Grandion?” she squeaked, a pathetic and mortifying sound. “Put me d-down! N-No!” This was as he considered the vine connected to her waist. “Wait. What are you doing?”

With a deliberate flick of his talon, he severed the vine. “Ready?” The massive muscles of his thighs coiled.

“No! Grandeeeeee … yoooooonnnn …”

The Island-World turned on its head as the Dragon performed a backflip off the edge of Ha’athior Island.

Hualiama unashamedly wailed her heart out as the world turned over again, twice, for the Dragon wished to show off his aerial prowess to the melody of the joy gushing through his hearts. His grip almost stopped her breath, but it was also comforting in an utterly overpowering way.

And her mind was as cracked as an earthquake-cleft Island. Lia had just about mastered her terror when the Dragon growled, “Roll?”

“Noo … wooo … ooooeee!”

Before she knew it, Grandion thumped down on the rim wall of the volcano, right beside the boulder where she and Ja’al had kissed. He set her daintily upon her feet.

“How did her Royal Highness enjoy her first Dragon flight?”

Lia wobbled and would have collapsed, had Grandion’s paw not flashed out again to steady her. Now if she could only recapture her heart and stuff it back inside her chest!

With a coy glance at him, she complained, “That was not nice, you great big bully.”

A wickedly unrepentant chuckle, chock-full of Dragon fire and arrogance, constituted his response. Grandion rumbled, “Go collect those unnecessary items, little one. I shall bathe in this lake.”

“Let me alert the guards before–”

“They’re already alert,” said Grandion, nonchalantly dropping toward the lake on outspread wings. “Tell them to keep out of my way.”

“Tyrant,” Lia muttered.

“I heard that,” floated back to her on the breeze.

* * * *

Ja’al shouted, “You’re doing what?” Lia had never seen the tall, tan monk turn quite so pasty. “Lia, people don’t ride with Dragons, or on them, or any such nonsense! Where do you think … oh, no, no … NO! You and your dreams about flying! You’re forcing this poor Dragon to stick his head in a noose for you. Foolish girl! Don’t you realise how forbidden this is?”

“How can something be more or less forbidden, Ja’al?”

“It’s wrong!”

“It doesn’t feel wrong to him–to us.”

The way Ja’al’s eyes bulged brought a horrid, constricted feeling to Hualiama’s gut. “You have … feelings … for this creature! Unholy, perverted feelings.” He made a sign of the Great Dragon’s warding. “Lia, please. Tell me it isn’t true.”

“Look,” she said, her face flushing hotly, “I have feelings for Flicker and you don’t call those unholy. He’s my friend. I care for him, Ja’al. I owe that dragonet my life, and if anyone laid a finger on him, I’d destroy them. It’s that simple, yet the feeling runs so deep it’s like a river thundering into the Cloudlands; a river so deep and wild, it can never be grasped or contained. How I feel about Flicker is more than friendship, Ja’al. It’s a kind of love–a good, wholesome love.”

“I knew you’d use that word.”

Hualiama shook his hand off with an irate hiss. She shrugged the scabbard for her Nuyallith blades onto her shoulders and buckled the strap across her upper chest. “Aye, love!” She emphasized the word with a zing of the blades as she pushed them home.

“Always driven by your feelings, Lia. I hadn’t pegged you as the type. You aren’t weak, you’re the strongest woman I know.” Poor Ja’al, he was physically shaking as he tried to express the depths of his horror. “This is criminal. It’s inconceivable!”

Suddenly, her anger evaporated. Softly, Lia said, “Listen to me. Please, dear brother Ja’al. You know how you felt about your vows? That you must deny all, even a prodigal Princess and her pathetic attempts to distract you with a swift peck on the lips, to serve the Great Dragon?”

“Aye,” he muttered, unwillingly.

“That is how I feel about Grandion. It feels right. My whole life I have dreamed of Dragons, learned about Dragons, even been brought up by Dragons on Gi’ishior, it seems. Now I have the chance to right a monstrous wrong. I see only one path, although it is difficult and dangerous and probably profane. Ja’al, if this is the path the Black Dragon has set before my feet–”

“–then may you tread it with the courage of a Dragon,” he finished the ancient saying for her.

“Thank you.”

“But you’d go without my blessing.”

Lia paused in tying a pouch of supplies onto her belt. Consumed by dread, did he not see how he wounded her with his words? “Won’t you wish me well, Ja’al?”

His sigh deflated his chest like a punctured Dragonship balloon. “I wish you less moons-madness and several Islands’ worth of good sense in exchange, but I see you will not be dissuaded. Frankly, I’d rather argue with that feral Dragon than a woman whose mind is clearly made up! Therefore, I will say this: Go burn the heavens with your Dragon, Hualiama of Fra’anior.”

Distantly, the mighty Black Dragon’s thundering quaked the Island-World’s roots–a sound felt more in the spirit than in a physical sense. Lia’s spine crawled with the awareness of momentous magic. She gaped open-mouthed at the monk, who appeared as nonplussed as she.

“What was that, if not a blessing?” she objected.

“Heavens above and Islands below, I haven’t a clue, Lia,” he whispered. “Strange events are afoot, and stranger days will be dawning, should the Great Dragon place his beneficent paw upon this wool-brained venture.”

They shook their heads in tandem.

“Very well,” said Ja’al. “I shall attest to Master Jo’el what you have done and trust he does not summarily shorten me by a head.” Unexpectedly, the monk enfolded Lia into his strong arms, and hugged her until her ribs creaked. “Hurry back, moons-mad girl. We need to end Ra’aba’s reign.”

She hugged him back as hard as she could. “Silly monk. You couldn’t stop me if you tried.”

* * * *

Running lightly along the trail up above the crater lake, which faithfully reflected every star in the skies above, Hualiama tried to shake Ja’al’s words, but they clung to her mind like a clammy mist. Was she perverted? Was it profane to maintain a high regard for Dragons? How could she characterise what had passed between her and Grandion, if not by using the very words Ja’al had seared on her mind? Forbidden. Unthinkable. Against the law. There was still time to backtrack. It could be explained. Only a few taboos had been tossed off the Island of sanity so far.

No. She had sworn an oath.

Despite Grandion’s accusations, Lia thought, she was not a disrespectful person. The law was good and just. It had great value. What if her oath was profane–or did the Black Dragon’s response rebut her qualms? What was there to fear if a Human should ride with a Dragon?

Ride with a Dragon? Hysterical laughter burbled upon her lips. Where would she even ride? In Grandion’s paw? Just consider the power of his grasp, and be reminded of the sensation of stalwart talons encircling her torso! One tiny squeeze and Hualiama’s insides would pour out of her ears. The only time Humans rode in Dragons’ paws, the histories suggested, was when they were condemned to ‘a short ride to a long drop’–a cheerless phrase referring to execution by being tossed into the Cloudlands or an active volcano.

Lia rubbed her arms. How could she trust a Dragon who planned to openly flout a rule regarded as inviolable for over a thousand years? People who played with Dragons risked being burned, the Isles saying went. On the other hand, why should Grandion trust a Human who spoke Dragonish and danced with impunity upon the holy Dragon Isle?

What a merry pickle!

From the rim wall above the monastery, Hualiama turned to see Grandion breaching the crater lake’s dark surface. Water sheeted from his muscular body. Mercy, what a monster! As a juvenile Dragon he was slimmer through the torso than an adult male, but what he lacked in physical size, he compensated for in strength. This Dragon had fought off two fully-grown males. She liked that his muzzle was a little slimmer than some. The skull spikes that adorned the back of his huge head and jaws were a spectacular thicket, four feet long and wickedly pointed, giving him an arresting, rakish air. A single row of spine spikes ran the length of his body, from the tallest three-foot spikes above his burly shoulders, decreasing in size down his long, whiplike tail.

And his colour! Great Islands, what wouldn’t a girl give to be so pretty? The dirty blue had been washed clean, revealing the striking tourmaline of his armoured scales which indeed imitated the gemstone for which his rare colour was named. Blue-coloured Dragons were often capable of summoning lightning and storm-wind attacks, or hail and ice. The most powerful Blues were also masters of magic-casting and shields, making them formidable opponents in battle. The lore she knew suggested that Grandion’s gemstone rarity signified unique Dragon powers.

If she was not mistaken, the Tourmaline Dragon took full note of her regard and flew up to her position with studied elegance, making his landing soft-pawed just twenty feet from her right hand, careful to furl his wings without striking her.

“Any improvement?” he inquired.

Smug reptile! Her grin widened, for he knew full well her answer. Time to see if he responded to compliments as Flicker did. Lia declaimed, “O mighty Dragon, outshining the very stars, do I know thee?”

At once, Grandion’s fire-stomach rumbled energetically, and his eyes blazed amber with pleasure as he inclined his muzzle to spurt Dragon fire twenty feet from his nostrils. Lia scented smoke, the tang of charred minerals, and the alluring hint of cinnamon she recalled so clearly from the time he held her powerless beneath his paw.

The Dragon strutted toward her with all the arrogance of a courting bird displaying its beautiful plumage, growling, “Indeed?”

“As my mother would say, Grandion, you do scrub up very nicely.”

“Hmm,” he blinked at her mischievous tone. “As for you, how many knives does a Human girl need? Four?”

“Fifteen, counting the hidden ones,” said Lia.

Pure white sparks eddied in his eyes–approval? Grandion whispered, “You are arrayed in splendour as a Dragoness for war.”

Oh, mercy. Hualiama struggled to control an abiding weakness in her knees. An undignified splutter emerged from her throat, “S-s-soooo w-whaa …” She folded her arms at his smoky laughter, and evaded his gaze. “Vexatious reptile! Er, what now, Grandion? What are you neither planning nor thinking about? I wanted to say, I really don’t want to leave Flicker behind. We need to find him.”

“We’ll probably catch the dragonet before he reaches Gi’ishior,” said Grandion. “Are you planning to scream every time we fly?”

Lia fumed, “I’d smack you for that comment, but I fear it’s rather pointless.”

On cue, Grandion struck what he probably thought was a heroic pose. Actually, when his knee-joints were the height of her nose, and his massive stance brought all of the striations in his major flight muscles into sharp relief, he did rather succeed in shooting lightning bolts along every nerve in her terrified little body. Dragon fear turned her bowels to mush. There was something so instinctual about standing beside a beast within which Hualiama could hear fire boiling away, that her body simply screamed, ‘Run away!’ Only, that would be as futile as whacking his flank. He could catch her more easily than a windroc snagging an unwary lemur.

The glint in his eye suggested that he knew all this; that the treacherous Dragon perceived the exact rhythm of her runaway heart, and that an apology was the very last matter on his mind. Molten heat rushed into her cheeks. Was the hulking serpent stalking her? What thoughts lurked behind that scorching regard, his eye-fires smouldering, changing colour and character before her fascinated gaze? Lia wanted to fall into his eyes and burn forever.

Grandion reached out with the speed of a cobra’s strike.

“Oh!” Lia beat her fists uselessly against his talons. “What are you doing?”

The Tourmaline Dragon paused with the Human girl’s feet dangling eight feet in the air, rumbling, “Currently, you have a monopoly on being executed should the Dragons discover your secrets. I wish to unite myself to your fate. Therefore, I am placing you in the dominant and conceivably the only comfortable position I can imagine for an extended flight–between my spine spikes, above my shoulders.”

Lia gasped, “My riding on your back would be regarded as dominant? As in, a five-foot Human girl dictating terms to a multi-tonne fire-breathing Dragon? Which of the five moons do you live on?”

“Isn’t it droll?” he chuckled.

“Ridiculous!”

Grandion shrugged hugely. “I don’t make the law. And, I fancy the idea of making history, even if it’s a potentially fatal sort of history.”

Truly the young rebel, Hualiama thought. Once she defeated her nerves, she would have to ask him about his past. What had he done to bring the Orange and Brown Dragons down on his neck? Why was he prepared to go to such lengths to help her–merely for the sake of an oath, spoken in haste, or did a deviously Dragonish reason underpin his behaviour?

Her feet touched down on the Dragon’s neck.

“Can you manage?” inquired Grandion.

Lia smothered a nervous, high-pitched giggle. Control yourself, girl! “Well, since we have neither been struck by lightning from a clear night sky, nor been torn apart by the enraged Spirits of the Ancient Dragons … isn’t this the easy part?”

How exhilarating to be standing, literally, on a dream she had treasured since her childhood. Lia walked charily up Grandion’s colossal right shoulder, expecting her feet to sink into soft skin. No, these were the iron-hard muscles of a Dragon, swathed in virtually impenetrable Dragon scale armour. When he shifted edgily beneath her, the muscles rolled like animate boulders beneath his hide. Was he as nervous as she, despite his bravado? Snagging a spine spike with her hand, Lia thrust a leg over to the Dragon’s left shoulder and settled down. It was not an uncomfortable position, a kind of natural saddle between his spikes, but she knew that after an hour or two, her backside would be numb.

What should she do now? What did one say to a Dragon? What emerged from Lia’s mouth was, “I’d really need a saddle.”

Grandion stifled a roar with a snap of his fangs. “Don’t even think I’m some beast of burden! I knew at once you’d have the wrong idea.”

“I am honoured, Grandion,” Hualiama whispered. “Humbled. And, were I to dare a little honesty–” she chuckled hollowly “–you scare the living pith out of me. Just that teensy … thing. Soul-destroying terror and–”

“Very wise,” he said, bending his flexible neck to check her position. “Hold on and trust me to do the flying. Dragons are not for nought called the lords of the airy spaces.”

She hugged the spine spike ahead of her as Grandion tramped toward the volcano’s edge, her throat as dry as dust, her stomach already turning cartwheels. The Tourmaline Dragon paused above the abyss, seeming to gather his thoughts. Heat rolled up Lia’s body, despite the night’s coolness, bringing a roaring to her ears and an overpowering sense of dislocation. Her brain refused to process the idea that she was about to fly Dragonback. The Cloudlands lay two miles below, Islands’ sakes!

Deep in her mind, Amaryllion spoke, Fly strong and true, little mouse. She had a sneaking suspicion he was laughing at her.

Then, Grandion tipped forward.