Page 77 of Dragon Fate (Age of Fire 6)

Other trolls climbed the walls, their half-wings buzzing angrily. Trolls are terrific climbers and leapers, and if they couldn’t catch her on the ground, they’d jump and hang on—the weight of a single troll was liable to bring her down. That would be the end of her, with that dragon-flesh-hungry mob.

The blow across her back surprised her. Two powerful limbs gripped her wings and she found herself unable to beat them. She plunged, the world whirling, toward the floor of the Star Tunnel.

This is the end of Wistala, the curiously detached part of her mind thought. What legacy have I left?

At the last moment, using every iota of her strength, she lurched and flipped onto her back so the troll riding her struck first with her atop it.

The others rushed in to finish her. She dug her claws into the ones battling her and prepared to sell her life at a terrible and bloody auction.

A rain of liquid fire fell around her like a protective storm.

Wistala! called a voice. It too bounced off the walls of the Star Tunnel. She knew that slightly high-pitched but clear carrying voice, and loved it more than any save one.

AuRon!

Was she dead? Was she lying in pieces on the cavern floor already, and this was some comforting, dying fantasy of her oxygen-starved brain? Was he dead, too, unbeknownst to her, and calling her to join him in this stormy afterlife?

No, it couldn’t be a fantastic death-dream. Her brain would have DharSii fly to her rescue, not her moody, mercurial brother.

She stomped the broken and bleeding troll hard and came away with a sii full of semi-scale and skin.

AuRon’s stumpy tail tip lashed her across the face. “Wistala!” he said again, flapping hard over her head as he shot another gout of fire. This one was thinner than the previous rain. Perhaps he had one more in him. He swooped under a troll diving after him, executing an infinitely more fluid maneuver than the troll could manage. It smacked into the cave floor with a sound like a dropped melon splitting.

“I’m coming, brother,” she said, leaping into the air. She tasted blood on her lips.

“Just follow me.”

She flapped after him. It turned into a strange escape, half flight and half climb. Soon they were in a rougher tunnel. He pulled her up over the lip of a hole when she swooned.

Cold. The stone of the cave floor was so cold. Had they been transported, somehow, to the permafrost in the far north?

“Wistala, are you hurt?” AuRon asked. It seemed a ridiculous question, with her leaving a trail of blood behind like a snail’s track.

Her brother. He tended to babble inanities under stress. He was a most sensible dragon before a fight and turned into a cornered dwarf, for all his lack of scale, once at grips with the enemy. But right after, he turned strange and hysterical until he recomposed himself.

She glanced down at herself, at the patches of rent and missing scale where the troll-blows had struck like boulders of a landslide, the great bite clean through her haunch that she expected would mean a limp for the rest of her life, the loose skin of one wing flapping like old Widow Lessup’s hanging linens on laundry day.

“Yes, I believe I am. May we rest for a moment?”

“Of course,” AuRon said. He returned to the hole, took a deep draught of air rising from it and cocked an ear so he might listen.

“You need water, or wine and brandy, to help the shock. Dwarfsbeard, if I can find the damn stuff in this thick forest.”

As AuRon babbled, she licked the worst of her wounds—the one in her haunch—and almost immediately languished into sleep, tucking her nose under her wing. In fitful consciousness, she assured herself she was still breathing and that her heartbeats could be heard. Then she passed into fair dreams involving DharSii and a matched set of hatchlings, four males and four females. They were residing in a cave painted gold—no, wait, that was just the sunset shining down the cave’s throat. White flowers bloomed all around the exit and she heard the distant cries of birds below.

“Eight the rare way,” DharSii said in the dream, griff out but closed tight in pride at her achievement. “Not one in a thousand dragonelles produce such a clutch,” he said.

BOOK TWO

Ability

“EGGS HATCH BEST IN SILENCE.”

—Dragon proverb

Chapter 8

The dwarfs ringed him like wolves around a hobbled horse. But they hadn’t eaten him yet. Maybe they were new to butchering dragons and were trying to determine where the best cuts of meat resided in him.

---