Daughter of Dragons

Chapter 1-2

“No. If you are not here when the dragonets are born, then they will not recognize you later on. And if they do not recognize you, they will try to eat you.”

“And if I came after the hunger but before the birth?”

Taziem rumbled a warning. “Lathwi, you are stretching my patience toward its limit today. Perhaps you were meant to see the lining of a dragon’s belly after all.”

Lathwi exposed her throat, inviting the she-dragon’s teeth. “It would be a privilege, Mother. That is far from the worst fortune that could befall me.”

The image-thought was laced through and through with sincerity; all camouflage for a single strand of laughter. A perfect response, Taziem mused to herself. Too perfect. Her study had taken a slow and unintentional turn over the years. As a result, the only thing still human about Lathwi was her feeble form.

“Get your stumpy neck out of my face,” Taziem rumbled irritably. “You are not worth the trouble that it would take to swallow you.”

“Then may I know why I cannot come after the hunger and before the birth?”

“Because bonds formed at birth last a lifetime,” she replied, a grudging tribute to her fosterling’s persistence. “Members of the same tangle know each other by their secret Names. In times of need, they can Call upon those Names for aid.”

“I would welcome another set of tanglemates.”

“So would any reasonable dragon. But why should you have an advantage that the rest of us do not?”

“Ah, I see now.” A flush raced across the plains of her dragon-scarred cheeks—a display of distress that she could neither hide nor control. “Then I can never return.”

“Your logic is sloppy.” The thought was quilled with scorn. “Bij and his offspring will go their own ways in due time. You may return then if it pleases you.”

“Time.” She curled her lip at the concept. “Only a hungry dragon counts the hours. How will I know when you are finally free to teach me again?”

“I will Call you,” she said, working the last half of the reassurance around a massive yawn.

Lathwi barely noticed the she-dragon’s chasming jaws or the oddly delicate curl of her snake-ish tongue. Her thoughts were hollow, and all for herself. “What shall I do between now and then?”

“That,” Taziem replied, yawning again, “is none of my concern, so long as you do it far from here.”

She shifted onto her belly, then deliberately closed her eyes. Lathwi stared at her for a moment longer, then turned to leave the chamber. Quite by accident, a displaced diamond lodged between her toes. Instead of shaking it loose as she had done so many times in the past, she clenched her toes and continued on to the outer caves without so much as a hitch in her stride. There, she stopped to examine her prize. It was not a diamond at all, she discovered then, but only a reddish stone. Although it did not appeal to her, she popped it into her mouth anyway, because a thing that had belonged to Taziem qualified as a thing worth keeping.

Then she went outside and retired to her favourite sunlit rock. Almost as an afterthought, she Voiced a Name.

G

The narrow landing that prefixed Taziem’s caves spanned sharply into view. The bronze dragon circled the spot twice, then touched down upon its smooth rock surface and furled his wings. Before he could announce his presence, a shadow came bounding down the mountain’s side and toward him.

Delight took wing within him. Lathwi! Out of all his tanglemates, he liked her best. He extended his neck as she drew near, and then gently touched noses with her. Her scent was pungent and dry like a dragon’s, yet sweetly spiced with animal musk and red blood. It thrilled him for reasons which he did not bother to define.

A thought danced into his head. “Shoq! You came!”

“You Called,” he replied.

As always, her size surprised him. How could she be so small? When he pictured her in his mind, she was almost as big as Taziem.

“Are you never going to grow?” he asked.

“I do not believe so.” She rolled her shoulders to show her unconcern, then stepped back to get a better look at him. A moment later, her strange blue eyes flared with approval. “I am glad to see that you are not suffering from the same affliction. If you continue to grow at this rate, you will be the rival of any sire in less than a century.”

“It is true,” came his thought, all puffed with pride. “I am large for my age.” He swatted her with his forearm, a playful cuff which tumbled her to the ground. “Perhaps that is because I am so quick: a quick dragon gets all it wants to eat.”

“Perhaps.” With cat-like dignity, she picked herself up. “Or perhaps it is because you are nothing but a giant bladder of gas.” She punched his sensitive nose then. His surprised hiss prompted her to add, “A bladder that leaks.”

He roared with appreciation. As small as she was, she was still every inch a dragon.

“Shhh, you will wake Taziem,” she cautioned. “If she finds me here, she will eat me.” He glanced furtively toward the mouth of the cave, then arched his neck into an unspoken query.

In response, she said, “She wishes me gone.”

“Ah.” He did not ask why; it was none of his concern. “Then we had best be off.”

He spread his forearms, exposing the junctures between limb and body. These were a young dragon’s soft spots, for the scales here were slow to mesh. She toyed with the idea of tickling those spots, but decided to postpone the attack until such time as she could enjoy his bellows of protest without fear of waking Taziem. Then, because she could not avoid the moment any longer, she backed into her tanglemate’s embrace. As his forearms closed around her, she turned her eyes away from the mouth of her mother’s caves.

“Go,” she told him.

He coiled into a crouch. His wings unfurled with a leathery snap. With a powerful thrust of his hind legs, he catapulted them into the sky. Then a slipstream of cold mountain air whisked them away from Taziem’s fang-like spire and toward the shaggy-pined slopes of lesser peaks. Lathwi watched the world pass beneath her with disbelieving eyes.

“Where do you want to go?” Shoq asked.

“I do not know,” she replied. “Could we just fly for a while?”

In response, he aligned himself with an outgoing wind.

The mountains subsided, giving way to scruffy foothills; as the day passed, these flattened into a forest. High above this sea of still-brown treetops, Shoq began to dance. As lithe as an otter in spite of his bulk, he favoured backward loops and dizzying, headlong spirals; but for variety’s sake, he also chased his tail and ran a zig-zagging race with his shadow. Although he was dancing strictly for himself, his exuberant antics dispelled Lathwi’s gloom. The feel of wind bracing her skin and gravity tugging at her guts stirred wild feelings within her. She might be caveless now, but she was still a dragon! Brimming with fierce pride, she shrieked for all the world to hear.

Shoq matched her cry with a roar of his own, then shot straight up into the sky. Higher and higher he climbed, his great wings straining for speed. His goal seemed to be the heart of a cloud. Lathwi’s blood began to pound in her ears, her breath caught in her throat like a bone. Then, just as her vision began to fade, he abruptly folded his wings and plunged toward the ground. Her vision returned, but only as a blur, her stomach crowded her heart. The forest’s skeletal canopy expanded, then expanded again, blotting all else from view. In spite of herself, she tensed, anticipating impact. Then Shoq pulled out of his headlong dive, so close to the trees that a few of the tallest branches tickled the soles of her feet.

Still panting from the excitement, she urged him to do it again. Tired now, he pretended not to hear.

“Were you frightened?” he asked, as they coasted along on the breeze which he had surreptitiously invoked.

“Not at all,” she replied.

“What if I had dropped you?”

“Then I would have flown by myself.”

“For a little while.”

They flew on in silence, heading west simply because that was the way the wind wanted to go. As their journey progressed, the top of the forest sprouted a faint green nimbus which seemed to shimmer in the sun’s waning light. Then a meadow spanned below them; it was dotted with the backs of grazing deer. The sight provoked a rumble from Lathwi’s belly.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. The image with which he answered her was one of vast emptiness. She directed his attention toward the herd. “Shall we hunt?”

“We shall,” he crooned, and cut a high, wide circle back toward the meadow’s edge. There, he swooped down on the herd with a roar, panicking its members into a helter-skelter dash for the trees on the far side of the field. Then he overtook a fat young buck and dropped Lathwi squarely on its back.

The deer’s legs buckled as she slammed into it. Before it could recover its footing and shake her off, she seized its antlers with both hands and wrenched its head sharply to one side. Bones popped. The body she was straddling went suddenly limp. As it started to collapse, she vaulted to the ground. And by the time Shoq circled back around again and landed, she had already split its carcass from breastbone to groin with one of her dragon claws.

“Which do you want—the heart or the liver?” she asked.

“I want them both,” he said, eying the carcass greedily.

Because it was bigger, she tossed him the liver. He snapped the hunk of dripping flesh out of the air, gobbled it down without chewing and then resumed his unblinking scrutiny of the stag’s remains. Then, because it was not wise to keep a hungry dragon waiting for his meat, she hastily excised the heart and the better part of a hindquarter.

“The rest is yours,” she told him, and then hauled her portion toward a patch of untrampled grass. When she was out of Shoq’s immediate sight, she spat her purloined stone onto the ground, then sat down and began to feed.

The meat was tender and warm, an orgy of stomach-pleasing flavours. She tore into it with her teeth and nails, pausing now and again to slurp at the salty-sweet juices which were running down her arms and chin. The sounds of her feasting mingled with those of Shoq’s. Like her, he ate noisily, and with gusto.

Twilight came and went while she fed, but she took no note of the darkening sky until there was nothing left of her feast except scraps of hide and raw white bone. She belched, welcoming the advent of night, then began to clean herself—first l*****g the stickiness from her hands, then rolling in the grass to scour her scales. By the time she was done, the heaviness in her belly had spread to her limbs and eyelids. Without further thought, she curled into a comfortable ball and promptly went to sleep.

G

A raven’s distant caw roused her from her dreams. She opened her eyes to find a new day in full bloom. She wrung the last vestiges of sleep from her veins with a full-body stretch, then pawed through the grass for her stone. Finding it, she then rubbed it clean with her fingers and returned it to its hiding place beneath her tongue. Ready for the world now, she stood up and looked for Shoq. He was stretched out in a nearby patch of grass, his great belly angled toward the sun.

A mischievous grin curved across her mouth. Here was an opportunity too good to forego! Silent as a cat, she started to stalk her tanglemate. He stirred in his dreams. She sank down into a crouch and then pounced. As she slammed into the mound of his belly, her fingers burrowed into the soft spots beneath his arms.

His outraged bellow set a flock of birds to wing. His retaliatory swat sent her tumbling backward into the grass. Pealing with laughter, she bounced to her feet. An instant later, he bowled her over again. She rammed her fist into his nose, then got up and started to run away. With a flick of his tail, he tripped her. So they played, oblivious to all else, until she was too spent from laughter and a***e to get up from the dirt. Suspecting a trick, he thumped her one last time. When she did not avenge herself, he settled down next to her and rumbled contentedly.