Page 70 of Lady Dragon
“I thought you argued that humanity isn’t a sign of weakness,” Kirek said, a humiliating heat threatening her eyes. She tried to tell herself it was just the smoke stinging them. “Not that I agree with that.”
Maybe I’m changing my mind.
“Or Raka is changing it for you.”
Do not speak her name!the dragon snapped—with her actual teeth, flashing near Kirek’s face.
“Am I not worthy?” Kirek taunted, her shame spiraling into anger. She needed to be careful, or Samansa might turn her new penchant for killing onher.
You just proved you are not.
Suddenly, Kirek was shouting. “I couldn’t kill her, not out of fear, butgrief. Whichisan emotion dragons possess, by the way—one that Raka supposedly died of, so even she should be able to understand! When I needed to act, all I could see was my mother, getting killed again before me. Or have you forgotten about that already? You were only just so desperately trying to remind me.” She shook her head and swatted her reeking hair out of her eyes—quickly dashing away her shameful tears. “Well, I haven’t forgotten her death so soon, and the Samansa I know hasn’t, either.”
The red dragon considered her.Maybe I’m not the Samansa you know anymore.
“I wish you were!” Kirek cried, waving a hand at her. “I wish you were the Samansa I recognize—even as a dragon!”
You think I recognizeyou, like this?The dragon’s lip quivered as though she wanted to bare her teeth again. To bite down.Yougrow softer with each sun’s passing. Just as you couldn’t end your mother, you couldn’t end this shriveled husk. It’s pathetic, Nakor.
Kirek felt ready to erupt like a volcano, but that name iced her over. “Nakor?What under the skies do you mean?”
The red dragon blinked those golden orbs.
“I’m not Nakor,” Kirek said, shaking her head, “no matter how much you think you might be Raka. Besides, Nakor was never a human, and Raka was supposedly bound and devoted to her.” A hiss escaped her own teeth. “I’m not feeling the devotion.”
The red dragon still didn’t say anything, only sat completely still.
“I understand what you’re doing, Samansa—or whoever you think you are,” Kirek ground out. “You’re trying to turn me against you, so you can lose yourself more readily. Well, I am not going to lose you. I’ve lost too much already. Not you.” Her voice caught. “Never you.”
The dragon turned away as if she couldn’t hold Kirek’s gaze any longer.Then get on my back while I’ll still let you.
Kirek glanced down. “What about the saddle?”
I’m half-starved, and it’s extra weight we don’t need.
“But what if we turn again?”
The red dragon looked over her shoulder with one great golden eye narrowed to a molten slit.I’m not planning on it. And if we do, I’ll be dead anyway, where we’re going.
As night fell and they flew closer to mountains that rose like blackened teeth to bite the already dark sky, some sending up plumes of smoke that streaked the air, the ground lit up beneaththem, cut with veins of orange fire. The acrid tang of hot metal and sulfur soon invaded Kirek’s nose in an invisible assault that grew stronger and stronger. They traveled in silence, for the most part. Once Kirek’s stomach had settled enough after rebelling against the smell of roasted dragon, she chewed on the last strips of meat she’d taken from the abandoned saddlebag and swallowed the final sip of water from the skin at her belt. At least she still had her daggers and her sword.
She wondered if either she or Samansa would be coming back from this. She rather doubted it.
They continued flying toward the highest of the active volcanoes. Kirek half wondered if the red dragon intended to fly them directly into the maw of its crater and incinerate them both.
Her concern over the volcano became especially acute when it erupted.
Kirek felt it in the air first; a subtle vibration, the quivering of a held breath. And then a rumbling took hold of the earth like a growl rising from within a massive dragon’s chest. Then the mountain spat fire, except far beyond any dragon’s reach. A colossal bloom of orange-white flame ate the dark sky, followed shortly by the all-consumingroarthat hit them next with the force of a sandstorm.
It threw the red dragon off course, tossing her in the air as easily as a leaf in a gale, and Kirek clung on with all her might, her thighs clamping down without the benefit of a saddle, her grip holding on to Samansa’s spikes like a lifeline. Because if she fell, she would surely die.
The red dragon righted herself before they hit the side of the mountain, but had to dive as a piece of rock half her sizecame streaking down from up above, trailing fire like a comet. Then she almost landed directly in a stream of lava, rippled in a charred crust cut with cracks of blazing orange—the deadliest, if slowest, current on earth. She barely swerved away from it, coming down hard in a scree of basalt and kicking up a wave of black rock before her claws finally caught and she skidded to a halt.
They both just breathed for a moment, the red dragon’s heaving sides making Kirek rise and fall with her shoulders. It took even longer for Kirek to be able to unclench her fists and thighs from their death grip and give them a moment of release. And yet another moment for her to realize it wasn’t only rock formations looming in the smoke and shadows around them between braided rivers of molten earth.
Skeletons. Massive skeletons, with ribs like the husks of half-sunken and rotted boats and hollow-eyed skulls the size of… well, a dragon’s. Because theyweredragons.
They’d landed in a dragon graveyard.
