Dor dreamed pleasantly of exploring in a friendly forest; the action was inconsequential, but the feeling was wonderful. He had half expected more nightmares, but realized they could not reach him up here in the sky. Not unless they got hold of some magic salve for their hooves.
Then in his dream he looked into a deep, dark pool of water, and in its reflection saw the face of King Trent. “Remember the Isle,” the King told him. “It is the only way you can reach me. We need your help, Dor.”
Dor woke abruptly, to find Irene staring into his face. “For a moment you almost looked like-“ she said, perplexed.
“Your father,” he finished. “Don’t worry; it’s only his message, I guess. I must use the Isle to find him.”
“How do you spell that?”
Dor scratched his head. “I don’t know. I thought-but I’m not sure. Island. Does aisle make sense?”
“A I S L E?” she spelled. “Not much.”
“I guess I’m not any better at visions than I am at adventure,” he said with resignation.
Her expression changed, becoming softer. “Dor, I just wanted to tell you-you were great with the smoke and everything.”
“Me?” he asked, unbelieving. “I barely scrambled through! You and Chet and Grundy did all the-“
“You guided us,” she said. “Every time there was a crisis and we froze or fouled up, you called out an order and that got us moving again. You were a leader, Dor. You had what it took when we really had to have it. I guess you don’t know it yourself, but you are a. leader, Dor. You’ll make a decent King, some day.”
“I don’t want to be King!” he protested.
She leaned down and kissed him on the lips. “I just had to tell you. That’s all.”
Dor lay there after she moved away, his emotions mixed. The kiss had been excruciatingly sweet, but the words sweeter yet. He tried to review the recent action, to fathom where he might have been heroic, but it was all a nightmare jumble, despite the absence of the night mares. He had simply done what had to be done on the spur of the moment, sometimes on the very jagged edge of the moment, and had been lucky.
He didn’t like depending on luck. It was not to be trusted. Even now, some horrendous unluck could be pursuing them. He almost thought he heard it through the cloudbank, a kind of leathery swishing in the air Then a minor kind of hell broke loose. The head of a dragon poked through the cloud, uttering a raucous scream.
Suddenly the entire party was awake and on its feet. “The wyverns!” Chet cried. “The ones whose nest we swamped! They have found us!”
There was no question of avoiding trouble. The wyverns attacked the moment they appeared. In this first contact, it was every person for himself.
Dor’s magic sword flashed in his hand, stabbing expertly at the vulnerable spots of the wyvern nearest him. The wyvern was a small dragon, with a barbed tail and only two legs, but it was agile and vicious. The sword went unerringly for the beast’s heart, but glanced off the scales of its breast. The dragon was past in a moment; it was flying, while Dor was stationary, and contact was fleeting.
There were a number of the wyverns, and they were expert flyers.
Smash was standing his own, as one ogre was more than a match for a dragon of this size, but Chet had to gallop and dodge madly to avoid trouble. He whirled his lasso, trying to snare the wyvern, but so far without success.
Irene was in the most trouble. Dor charged across to her. “Grow a plant!” he cried. “I’ll protect you!”
A wyvern oriented on them and zoomed in, its narrow lance of fire shooting out ahead. Cloud evaporated in the path of the flame, leaving a trench; they had to scramble aside.
“Some Protection!” Irene snarled. Her complexion was turning green; she was afraid.
But Dor’s magic sword slashed with the uncanny accuracy inherent in it and lopped off the tip of a dragon’s wing. The wyvern squawked in pain and rage and wobbled, partly out of control, and finally disappeared into the cloud. There were sputtering sounds and a trail of smoke fusing with the cloud vapor where the dragon went down.
It was a strange business, with Dor’s party standing on the puffy white surface, the dragons passing through it as if it were vapor-which of course it was. The dragons had the advantage of maneuverability and concealment, while the people had the leverage of a firm anchorage. But Dor knew the wyverns could undercut the people’s footing by burning out the clouds beneath them; all the dragons needed to do was think of it. Fortunately, wyverns were not very smart; their brains were small, since any expendable weight was sacrificed in the interest of better flight, and what brains they had were kept too hot by the fire to function well. Wyverns were designed for fighting, not thinking.
Irene was growing a plant; evidently she had saved some salve for it. It was a tangler, as fearsome a growth as the kraken seaweed, but one that operated on solid land-or cloud. In moments it was big enough to be a threat to all in its vicinity. “Try to get the tree between you and the dragon,” Irene advised, stepping back from the vegetable monster.
Dor did so. When the next wyvern came at him, he scooted around behind the tangler. The dragon, hardly expecting to encounter such a plant in the clouds, did a double take and banked off. But the tangler shot out a tentacle and hooked a wing. It drew the wyvern in, wrapping more tentacles about it, like a spider with a fly. The dragon screamed, biting and clawing at the plant, but the tangler was too strong for it. The other wyverns heeded the call. They zoomed in toward the tangler. Chet lassoed one as it passed him; the dragon turned ferociously on him, biting into his shoulder, then went on to the plant. Three wyverns swooped at the tangler, jetting their fires at it. There was a loud hissing; foul-smelling steam expanded outward. But a tentacle caught a second dragon and drew it in. No one tangled with a tangler without risk!
“We’d better get out of here,” Irene said. “Whoever wins this battle will be after us next.”
Dor agreed. He called to Grundy and Smash, and they went to join Chet.
The centaur was in trouble. Bright red blood streamed down his left side, and his arm hung uselessly. “Leave me,” he said. “I am now a liability.”
“We’re all liabilities,” Dor said. “Irene, grow some more healing plants.”
“I don’t have any,” she said. “We have to get down to ground and find one; then I can make it grow.”
“We can’t get down,” Chet said. “Not until night, when perhaps fog will form in the lower reaches, and we can walk down that.”
“You’ll bleed to death by night!” Dor protested. He took off his shirt, the new one Irene had made for him. “I’ll try to bandage your wound. Then-we’ll see.”
“Here, I’ll do it,” Irene said. “You men aren’t any good at this sort of thing. Dor, you question the cloud about a fast way down.”
Dor agreed. While she worked on the centaur, he interrogated the cloud they stood on. “Where are we, in relation to the land of Xanth?”
“We have drifted south of the land,” the cloud reported.
“South of the land! What about Centaur Isle?”
“South of that, too,” the cloud said smugly.
“We’ve got to get back there!”
“Sorry, I’m going on south. You should have disembarked an hour ago. You must talk to the wind; if it changed-“
Dor knew it was useless to talk to the wind; he had tried that as a child. The wind always went where it wanted and did what it pleased without much regard for the preferences of others. “How can we get down to earth in a hurry?”
“Jump off me. I’m tired of your weight anyway. You’ll make a big splash when you get there.”
“I mean safely!” It was pointless to get mad at the inanimate, but Dor was doing it.