But, Father! She tore off one tiny pocket of canvas and spat two remaining coins into it, gripped it in her teeth as she pushed on, keeping three of her four limbs moving on into darkness.
Roaring in her ears now. She felt wet on the interior of her nostrils.
The river!
She could see the prominence ahead. The battered columns, the rocks where Father would perch and fish, the jagged spur he always used to help himself back to the sleeping spot at the old meeting place or whatever it was.
She gave a glad, trumpeting cry and staggered on—at least she wasn’t leaving a blood trail anymore. She’d failed this time, but she knew where to get more coin now, she’d be trebly-careful, cross the man-road by tree limbs above, there wouldn’t be rat bites next time . . .
Wistala limped out onto the peninsula, climbed up to Father’s prominence.
He looked dispirited and sleepy; blood seeped from a reopened wound. Perhaps he’d tried to fly again. “Father!”
“Tala! Back so soon? Bartleghaff’s only just left to see how you were doing in the ruins. But perhaps he marked you—here he comes.”
“I . . . ,” Wistala managed to gasp. Her throat felt too dry for words.
Your contraption didn’t survive the trip, I see.
Wistala squinted against the setting sun. The old condor waggled his wings this way and that on the confused air currents of the gorge as he approached.
A baying like a thousand wolves broke out from the banks of the river, louder even than the sound of water crashing into rock.
“What’s this?” Father asked.
Wistala could manage thought-pictures: “Some dogs smelled me. I killed one.”
Bartleghaff swept low over the peninsula but didn’t land. “AuRel: it’s the Dragonblade and his pack!”
Father blinked, let out a deep breath. “So he’s found me,” he said to no one in particular.
“The Dragonblade?” Wistala asked.
“The dwarves would hire him, I suppose.” His wings drooped a little farther, and he searched the banks. Wistala saw black shapes bounding through the thick mist-washed ferns. Hunched shapes moved in the lengthening shadows of the woods beyond.
“They’re coming off their horses now!” Bartleghaff shouted on another low sweeping pass.
“Fathered by a wolf and mothered by a bear, it seems, with the memory of a tortoise to boot, for his sire was killed by dragons long ago, and he’s been seeking vengeance ever since.”
“Do you suppose he was at our cave?” Wistala asked.
“Dragons must land sometime, and he always finds their refuge,” Father said.
He straightened and got to his feet, a new light in his eyes. He cocked his head at Bartleghaff and flicked a griff up and out. “Go gather your relatives for that feast, old croaker.”
Wistala didn’t like any of this. Father’s words set her trembling with the worst fear she’d ever known. If only she weren’t so small, fireless. Useless, useless, useless. “Father, I did find you some coin.” She spat out the canvas bag-bottom; her spit made it smell faintly of oats. She nosed out two tarnished coins: one of gold, the other of silver.
“Marvelous, daughter,” Father said, nuzzling her fringe. “A pair, alike and yet not twins. Like you and Auron.” He took them up with his tongue, carefully placed them to either side in his mouth.
The dogs let out another joined cry.
Must get away . . . “Are we going to run from the dogs?”
“Tala, I’m never going to fly again, in the air or on land. This fellow’s killed more dragons than you have teeth, but he’s never tried his luck against me. If I can—”
“Let me help you. I’ll draw off the dogs.”
Father stamped the ground, hard enough to cause Wistala to bounce.
“NO!”
His roar echoed off the gorge walls, louder than the rushing water, louder than the baying dogs.
Frightened, she tucked her head down into her wounded joint.
“Tala, you’re too young for this fight. The best way for you to avenge your brother and sister is to have clutches of your own. Each hatchling of your own who lives to breed avenges them thrice over.”
“The dogs—they’ll bite and hold.”
“I’m not afraid of the dogs or anything else that walks or crawls or swims. Now go.”
The dogs must have caught a fresh scent, perhaps Father’s blood on the wind, for they set up an eager clamor.
She stood there, shaking. She’d led them right to Father! That was why they’d sent a single old dog to nudge her along! “I won’t. I can’t.”
“Promise me, Wistala. Clutches of your own. Lots and lots of hatchlings.”
He nosed her over the edge of the precipice and looked once more down on her. His eyes crinkled, and he no longer looked fearsome and angry.
Love. Wistala’d seen it before when he gazed at Mother as she slept.
“Thank you for the coins, Tala.”
With that, he turned. She saw his tail whip briefly overhead, its bronze catching the last of the setting sun. She heard him growl something to Bartleghaff, but couldn’t catch it over the churn beneath.
No. She’d climbed up and escaped before. She wouldn’t climb down this time. Not even the pain in her dog-bitten sii could stop her.
She slipped over the lip of the cliff and wormed between two pieces of fallen masonry. From the crack, she watched Father advance down the ridge of the narrow peninsula, choosing a rocky outcropping difficult to approach.
Dogs ran toward him in a mass of limbs and white-rimmed eyes and teeth. Behind the dogs, a file of men approached, led by a tall, broad figure in black armor. He was carrying a spear in one hand and a great sword in the other, helm with wings reaching up and almost touching above his crown.
The Dragonblade?
As the dogs approached, Father roared:
Foe and friend ’tween cave and sky
All hear me now before I die
Fire and blood this night will see
When filial vengeance I take of thee!
If any of the assassins understood his death song, they showed no sign of it.
Father ignored the dogs as they swarmed around him, leaping to reach his joints and claws. Barbed shafts flew from the archers and broke against his crest and scales. Father sent a great jet of fire up and across the crest of the peninsula, striking man and pine woods beyond. As the trees exploded into flame, she heard men’s voices cry out. Wistala saw flaming figures fall down the steep sides of the pathway.
The dogs—all alike and bearing the same painted design on their sides as the old one she’d killed by the bank—jumped and bit and hung from Father’s belly and limbs, planting their feet and pulling, arching their backs as they tugged at his flesh. Father was screaming in pain and turned into a whirlwind, biting and lashing at the dogs with his claws. But there were so many, and new slavering beasts jumped up to take the place of each one he killed.
The man in the black armor advanced, raising his spear. It sparked and flashed like distant lightning, lighting his armor and throwing shadows all around.
A hot lump burned in Wistala’s breast. Father couldn’t kill the Dragonblade with dogs pulling at him from every direction. She dragon-dashed forward, squeaking out a roar.
She’d never smelled such a thick blood odor in her life, if anything made sharper by the oily smell of burning dragonflame.
Mad-eyed dogs came at her, and she recoiled, but as her head came up, muscles in her breast took over, and she spat. A thin jet of flame arced out at the dogs, but they jumped aside or over the pathetic puddle of flame.
The dogs, moving so fast they seemed shadow rather than flesh, piled on her.
A white-tipped spear erupted from Father’s neck, and he turned mouth wide and roaring at the black-armored figure who stood atop a rock, silhouetted against the burning trees behind. Arrows that glowed as they flew struck Father all about the neck and jaw and burned there.
Wistala staggered forward, feeling the dogs pull at her. She spat the last of her flame at dog haunches clustered at Father’s back leg and pulling him over, and was rewarded by agonized yelping above the snarls of the three dogs dragging at her.
Father rolled, crushing the dogs, sending others spinning off into the darkness, the spear lodged in his throat like a great bone. The Dragonblade leaped forward and slashed at Father’s belly, opening a wound fully the length of Wistala.
Other men stood at some kind of machine on the peninsula. It sent an oversize arrow into Father’s side, punching through scale as easily as her claw-tip could go through a leaf.
“Father!” she cried.
The Dragonblade ducked under Father’s bite and swept up with his sword. Father’s head and neck crashed down, almost severed.
Wistala forgot the pain, forgot the dogs trying to pull her limb from limb.
She looked into Father’s eyes as the battle fire faded and they went dry and glassy. AuRel, Bronze of the Line of AuNor, had joined Mother in the stars above.
Wistala wailed out her pain to the sky.
The Dragonblade knelt and kissed the pommel of his sword, and his men broke into some manner of song.