Scrapplings Children of the Dragons

Chapter 2: Crossing the Hills-1

Chapter 2: Crossing the HillsIn the beginning, the great dragon Na lay down on the sea, stretched himself out across its surface and made a land of his body, nesting the eggs of other dragons all around him. He hatched them one by one, from Anara to Salara. Forests took root on Na’s slopes, and the moving part of the dragon retreated to the hollow earth, leaving his body to become the land itself. One day he will shift the land again. We did not know that we were living in the time of legends.

– A letter from Enomae

Darna’s heart thundered. She heard raised voices from the courtyard: the priestess, and the prince’s brother. The Cereans babbled. She ran as well as she could.

Somewhere, an owl hooted. Darna struggled up a slope and into the orchards. She followed the paths until she reached the woodlands, then walked under the shadow of the trees with the moonlit road just in sight, all night long. At dawn she stepped out into the open and looked back. The villages were waking, roosters crowing, farmers letting their cattle out to pasture. The keep lay like a discarded pebble beside the bay, its blue and orange pennants flapping in the wind. Beyond it the Cerean ship sat at anchor, sails furled tight.

Darna’s legs were tired, her ankle sore, and her belly sharp with hunger. She’d had no time to take bread from the kitchen. She had nothing but those very few small beads. Ahead of her, the road disappeared into forested hills and the mountains beyond. Darna’s stomach growled. She leaned on her stick and thought. A cart clattered along the road above her and she dove into the underbrush, taking refuge in the soft brown leaves under a bush. She held herself as still as she could, waiting until it passed.

It was after midday when she woke. She was thirsty and her stomach growled. At least she had the paring knife that she’d absent-mindedly stuck in her belt the night before. She waited and watched until the sun sank into the hills and torchlight flickered from the keep towers. There was a village nearby. She crept around the backs of its cottages until she found a crust of old bread on a garbage heap and a dipper by a water trough. She ate and drank then she walked on, setting out along the long road to Anamat.



Looking back, she wasn’t sure how she had survived that first part of the journey. She was hungry all the time. She stayed away from the road in daylight and dodged the villages as much as possible, eating only what she could steal from the fields, unripe berries and bitter raw greens. She searched the edges of farmyards for eggs, and when she found one she poked a hole in it with her knife and sucked out the gooey contents raw. She drank from streams and from wells. She picked from scrap heaps, and she stayed away from the temples.

Every hobbling step brought her closer to Anamat and carried her further from the keep. She slept in short spurts, day and night. She looked for places the dragonlets guarded, which seemed to be safer from wild beasts. Dragonlets were the geniuses of small corners of the world. To Darna, they looked to be about the size of a dog or a large cat. They kept her silent company, hovering at the corners of her vision even when the great dragon was nowhere to be seen.

On the third morning, Darna looked back at the low fields of Tiadun for the last time. They were an irregular patchwork of bright and dark green laced with glistening brooks. Sheep baaed in nearby pastures. A farmer turned his team of oxen as they plowed a field. Even the dirt looked like something a person could eat, not like the rocks of the mountains ahead. She thought of turning back to take what the prince would give her, a position of some power, some subservience. There would be food, but she would never see Tiada again, and never see Anara at all. She spat over her shoulder and forged ahead.

It was harder to find food in the mountains, but once she had passed the border temple she didn’t feel the need to hide as much. The herders and bandits who camped in the mountains owed nothing to the prince. She did hide once, when a caravan was passing. She overheard the drivers saying that they would reach civilized lands again by full dark. She trailed them, falling further and further behind and she stubbed her toe midway through the afternoon which slowed her down even more. At dusk, she thought she could see green fields ahead, but she’d found a good overhang to sleep under, so she waited.

In the morning, she had to go through a narrow pass. A dust-encrusted man crouched on a ledge handing over the path.

“Going to Anamat, are you?” he asked.

Darna grunted in response.

“Did your ma give you beads for the journey.”

“Got no ma,” Darna said.

“Sure, they all say that.”

Darna shrugged.

“So you got no beads?” The bandit raised his eyebrows, considered her stick, her torn cloak, her general thinness. It was clear that she didn’t have anything worth stealing.

The bandit whistled. Another whistle answered him. “Go on then,” he said. “We won’t bother you.”

A half-dozen bandits emerged from their hiding places above the road, waving to her and talking to each other, waiting until a wealthier traveler came their way.

Then, quite suddenly, she entered Getedun. She’d seen no dragonlets for a whole day, but now one scuttled across the road. It was different, with unfamiliar markings, and unlike the Tiadun dragonlets it shied away from her.



Darna entered a farmland bounded by low hills. High, craggy mountains loomed to the west. A crossroads lay ahead, with a signpost and a girl standing still at its center. The girl stayed exactly where she was, turning only a little to look at Darna as she approached. At one corner of the crossroads, a spring burbled and there was a carved stone bench and a shrine beside it. In the shrine sat a plump dragon carved of malachite: Getera. The girl poured out the last drops of water from her water skin into the bowl under the dragon’s statue then refilled it with water from the spring and drank.

Darna considered going around the crossroads to avoid the girl, but she was thirsty, and it was only a girl. Millet and wheat sprouted in the fields all around. Smoke blew in from a village a little way to the east, and a bit of roof poked out of the trees in the wooded area off to the north. A farmer rolled his cart down a road beside a stream. The cart creaked away into the distance and the roads were silent again apart from the tap of Darna’s stick and the shuffle of her feet.

The crossroads signpost was made of cedar from the mountains, tall and dark red-brown with designs of flowers, writing, and arrows carved on its top. The girl was looking intently at it when Darna came up to her.

“What’s that sign say?” Darna asked, her voice cracking a little from disuse.

The girl looked over her shoulder. “Me?” she squeaked.

“Of course you,” Darna said. “There’s no one else here, is there?”

“You mean I’m not invisible?” the girl asked.

Darna wished she hadn’t said anything. People might think that she was odd for staring at the sky, but at least she didn’t think she was invisible.

“Where are you going?” the girl asked Darna. Straight, dark hair fell across her face, curling a little at the ends. It didn’t even reach her shoulders, which meant she was a servant or a peasant, not a chieftain’s daughter or one of the princes’ kin. She was taller than Darna and looked like she had been well-fed, though. She was older, too, maybe as much as sixteen, which was nearly old enough to be a priestess. She wasn’t one, though, at least not yet. Darna tried to edge past her.

“I’m just going where everyone goes,” Darna mumbled. “To Anamat.”

“But which way is it? I don’t know what the sign says but I heard that Anamat was over three ranges of mountains.”

“Like that one?” Darna asked, pointing toward the craggy peaks.

The girl shook her head. “No, that’s way I came, from Helanum. I…”

Down the road from Tiadun came a sound like muted, distant thunder.

“Shush!” Darna said.

The girl was listening too. “What is it?” she asked.

“Horses,” Darna said. The girl was a fool as well as crazy if she didn’t know what a horse sounded like. That, or she came from a village that princes never visited.

“I gotta go,” Darna said. “Don’t tell them I’m here!” She dove into the bush, flattening herself on the prickly twig-covered ground. The girl followed her.

“What are you doing here?” Darna said. “You don’t have to hide from them.”

“But why do you?” the girl asked.

“It’s just in case. Who are you anyway?” Darna demanded. “Are you going to Anamat?”

“My name is Myril. I came from Helanum, and I’m going to Anamat too.” As the horses walked slowly toward them, she told Darna her story, or at least some of it.



Myril looked back at her village from Helana’s last shrine, at the edge between the green woodlands and the dry hills. The shrine was a simple stone pillar with a niche for an amethyst statue of the dragon. Myril had a pouch of small beads, a loaf of bread stuffed with olives, and two boiled eggs. She had eaten three boiled eggs the day before, on her way up from the village. The people at the market said that it was three days’ walk to the next valley, if all went well. Myril left a piece of the bread and a bead at Helana’s shrine then stepped into Na’s country, leaving behind everything and everyone she’d ever known and loved. If only she could have stayed, but her sister needed to stay more than she did.

As she entered the mountains, Myril thought of the children’s stories about how the dragons had made the land. Na’s crags cut a hard line against the ice-blue sky and pines loomed over the rocky path. Myril’s feet hurt, and she longed to be home, and not alone. Until the day before, she’d always been with her mother or her younger sister. Her sister was sickly and simple-minded. She wasn’t strong or clever enough to survive the journey to Anamat, even though custom dictated that younger daughters and sons should leave their villages and go to the city, or at least to the keep town. Myril had gone in her place, and she had chosen Anamat over the keep.

Exhaustion and homesickness dragged at her, but she kept walking. Her footsteps echoed in the silent, deserted pass. She ate the last of her bread and drained her water skin. The only people she saw on the mountain trail were a pair of guardsmen arguing over the last drink in their flask and a man with a mangy donkey, slouching toward Helanum. She hid from them, and once they’d passed she followed the track on toward Getedun. A few birds flew overhead, not enough to ease her loneliness.

Myril didn’t know the names of the coarse herbs growing in that rocky landscape, or which were good to eat. As the shadows lengthened and the air chilled, she began to look at the small, coarse seedlings and wondered if they were worth prying from those rocks. Some of them looked a little like the greens a donkey might graze on, but none were the herbs that Myril knew from her mother’s cooking pot. She found no streams, no water of any kind. The snow was sparse and far away, up steep and treacherous-looking slopes. Myril was tired. She wanted water and food. She wanted to sit down by the fire and stir the pot, to see if the kittens were hunting mice yet, to help her sister plait her hair, to mend a skirt. Could she go home, or be a servant in the keep? There she might at least see her family again.

The sky darkened ahead as if it might rain. Myril wished she could find a shrine or a cave to shelter in for the night, a corner in which she might imagine herself at home instead of in a barren, exposed wilderness.

Just as the setting sun touched the peaks above with rose-colored light, Myril glimpsed blue between the rocks ahead, a tiny lake of melted snow. She climbed over the rocks heading straight toward it as if it might disappear if she went around by the path. She bent her head to the lake and drank like an animal, then with cupped hands. Finally she filled her water skin with the cold, clear water.