“If I hadn’t given them reason to believe I was still interested in gods and dragons.”
“Yes. I see you’ve come to some understanding of the attempt on your life. When we saw your beacon, all knew what it could mean. Narim ... all of us ... tried to make Iskendar listen to reason. He didn’t have to agree with us; all he had to do was get out and live. But he wouldn’t. It’s not your fault.” Davyn laid his hand on MacAllister’s arm.
The Senai didn’t welcome it, but he didn’t shake it off either. “Perhaps if I had known some of this earlier, we might have been able to avoid the event as well as the guilt. So where is Narim?”
“He’s helping the survivors find a place to settle until we can find a new sanctuary. With your permission, we’ll send him news right away. He is most concerned ... most anxious, as you can imagine, to find out what’s happened with you ... what happened with Keldar. We’ve all wondered. ...”
“We need to keep moving. I’ll tell you about Keldar as we go.”
As we set out again on the darkening road, MacAllister was gloomy and untalkative. The Elhim enjoyed themselves as always. Davyn clapped Tarwyl on the back. “Never will I go plotting without you, friend. ‘Sit in the market,’ you said. ‘After thirteen days of hiding, they’ll need supplies.’ ”
Tarwyl laughed his deep-throated laugh, always unexpected from a soft-faced Elhim. “At least you remembered to bring your kit. I’ll have to share your cup and dig into my purse to buy a change of shirt!”
I brought up the rear and watched for pursuit. Someone had to keep a mind on danger.
In the three weeks since that day, we had visited three dragon camps. Tarwyl and Davyn would work their way into the lair, posing as an ironmonger’s assistants looking for custom from the Ridemark, or supply clerks hunting work. MacAllister instructed them to watch for any dragon that looked older than average and had either an oddly formed shoulder or back, or one that seemed to draw an unusual number of birds about it. Idiot. He might as well have told them to look for Grimaldi the dwarf king, the enchanted swan Ludmilla, or any other creature from his myth songs. But the Elhim took the Senai’s word as god-spoken. At the first three camps they had found no possibilities, and now we sat in the hovel near Fandine, waiting, waiting, waiting—interminably waiting.
“At last!” The sun was low when I saw the two slight figures coming over the rise in the road at the edge of Wyefedd. I yelled at the two as they strolled casually toward our hiding place. “Can you lift your feet any slower?” I said. “We’ve had such an exciting day waiting for you, I can’t bear it to end.”
“We’re saving something for the journey back,” said Davyn.
I felt MacAllister jump up in the darkness behind me. “You found something?”
“There are four dragons in Fandine. One of them has a ‘bad wing.’ We didn’t see it, but the smith told us of it. We could see flocks of birds over the place where it lay. It seems the first possibility.”
“We’ll go in tonight,” said MacAllister. “Show me how to find him.”
With a burned stick Tarwyl drew a map on a scrap of wood, showing a little-used path into the lair, the guard posts, the outbuildings, the Riders’ huts, and the approximate position of the kai.
“How will you know if he’s the one, Aidan?” asked Davyn. “You’ve never told us what you plan. Perhaps we should wait for Narim. He should catch up with us any day now.”
“Lara must command it to say its name, just as she did with Keldar that first time,” said the Senai, pulling his cloak about his shoulders.
Davyn was horrified. “But you said you almost—”
“I wasn’t dying; Keldar was. I felt it from him. This time I’ll be ready. Let’s go.”
“Wait!” I said as the Elhim followed the Senai out the door. “You might ask me—” But by the time I shouldered my armor bag, they were already halfway through the village. I had to shove my way through a clot of five nagging beggar children to catch them before they disappeared.
MacAllister strode the half league through the stickery brush and stunted trees to the boundary of the lair as if the legions of the Ridemark were on his heels. While Davyn and Tarwyl scouted the path into the lair, the two of us crouched behind a wall of crumbling red sandstone and looked down on Fandine. Short bursts of sharp-tongued, blue-orange fire streaked across the darkening sky. Balefire, my clan called it, for its color and intensity told us that the kai was in pain—and thus likely to blast anything that wandered within a thousand paces of its snout. Wounded kai were exceedingly dangerous.
“I’m sorry you have to go,” said MacAllister softly, breaking his long silence as if he had read my thoughts. “If I could spare you, I would.”
A kai screamed in the distance, the cry echoing from the red cliffs behind us and before us, and the Senai shuddered at the sound.
“We can stop now,” I said. “Even if they were once as you believe, they are no longer. They’re killers. They have no minds. You’ve been deceived. Narim has—”
“Has what?” His dark eyes flared, reflecting the blue-orange fire of the wounded kai.
I couldn’t answer. “Wait and talk to him.”
“No.” He pointed toward the spot at the cliff edge where Davyn had just reappeared and was beckoning us to hurry.
We used the last of the daylight to creep down the steep path—if one could call a crumbling, boot-wide seam in the cliff face a path. At every step more of the red stone dissolved to powder under our feet or split into tiny pebbles that skittered down the sheer drop beside us. By the time we wedged ourselves into the too-small crack in the base of the path where Tarwyl waited, the only light was a fading red glow in the west. The lair itself lay in darkness.
“A quarter of the way around the lair to your right, just below that cone-shaped spire,” said Tarwyl. “Just as I drew it. There are three Rider huts along the way; only the first two are occupied.”
A thunderous bellow split the night, and the spout of fire lit the valley. MacAllister’s face grew so rigid that I thought his skin must split and show the iron beneath it.
“They don’t wander ... the wounded ones?” said MacAllister, his eyes fixed on the bilious streaks fading in the sky.
“No. Only if its Rider commands it. If it is not allowed to go to ground where it chooses, it will stay in one place until it heals or dies.”
I was donning my armor as I answered him. MacAllister had, of course, not brought his. A worried Davyn started to speak, but another bellow—grinding, shrill, murderous—cut him off. By the time the echoes had died away, I had finished lacing my boots, and Tarwyl had given a small lantern to MacAllister.
“I’ll carry that,” I said, jamming my helm over my hair to mask the last evidence that I was a woman. “You stay behind me, just out of the light.” I hung my coiled whip on my belt and patted my belt pouch to make sure my emergency gear was still in it. I didn’t want MacAllister to see what I’d brought. It might worry him. It might make him leave me behind.
“The blessings of the One Who Guides go with you,” said Davyn. “We’ll be waiting for you right here.”
MacAllister pressed his hand and Tarwyl’s, and then turned to me with a mocking bow. “To our doom, Mistress Lara,” he said, raising his dark eyebrows to pull his eyes wide open. “Shall we be the dragon’s saviors or its supper?” Then he motioned me to lead.