Even as he looked, her calm broke; her eyes went wide, her mouth started to open.
Wuller whirled back in time to see the dragon rising from its perch, its immense wings spread wide to catch the wind. It rose, wheeled about once, and then swept down toward the village, claws outstretched, like a hawk diving on its prey.
For a moment Wuller thought it was diving directly at him, and he covered his face with his hands, as if he were still a child.
Then he remembered how high that mountaintop was, and his mind adjusted the scale of what he had just seen — the dragon was larger and farther than he had assumed. Ashamed of his terror, he dropped his hands and looked up again.
The dragon was hovering over the village, directly over his own head. Wuller felt a tugging at one arm, and realized that Illuré was trying to pull him out from under the great beast.
He yielded, and a moment later the creature settled to the ground in the village common, the wind from its wings stirring up a cloud of grey dust and flattening the thin grass. The scent of its hot, sulphurous breath filled the town.
A swirl of dust reached Wuller, and he sneezed.
The dragon’s long neck dipped down, and its monstrous head swung around to look Wuller directly in the eye from a mere six or seven feet away.
He stared back, frozen with fear.
Then the head swung away again, the neck lifted it up, and the mighty jaws opened.
The dragon spoke.
“Who speaks for this village?” it said, in a voice like an avalanche.
“It talks!” someone said, in tones of awe and wonder.
The dragon’s head swept down to confront the speaker, and it spoke again.
“Yes, I talk,” it rumbled. “Do you?”
Wuller looked to see who it was addressing, and saw a young man in blue — his cousin Pergren, just a few years older than himself, who had only recently started his own flock.
Pergren stammered, unable to answer coherently, and the dragon’s jaws crept nearer and nearer to him. Wuller saw that they were beginning to open — not to speak, this time, but to bite.
Then a man stepped forward — Adar, the village smith, Wuller’s father’s cousin.
“I’ll speak for the village, dragon,” he called. “Leave that boy alone and say what you want of us.”
Wuller had always admired Adar’s strength and skill; now he found himself admiring the smith’s courage, as well.
The dragon reared up slightly, and Wuller thought it looked slightly amused. “Well!” it said. “One among you with manners enough to speak when spoken to — though hardly in a civil tone!”
“Get on with it,” Adar said.
“All right, if you’re as impatient as all that,” the dragon said. “I had intended to make a few polite introductions before getting down to business, but have it your way. I have chosen this village as my home. I have chosen you people as my servants. And I have come down here today to set the terms of your service. Is that clear and direct enough to suit you, man?”
Wuller tried to judge the dragon’s tone, to judge whether it was speaking sarcastically, but the voice was simply too different from human for him to tell.
“We are not servants,” Adar announced. “We are free people.”
“Not any more,” the dragon said.
2
Wuller shuddered again at the memory of Adar’s death, then turned his attention back to the meeting that huddled about the single lantern in his father’s house.
“We can’t go on like this,” his father was saying. “At a sheep a day, even allowing for a better lambing season next spring than the one we just had, we’ll have nothing left at all after three years, not even a breeding pair to start anew!”
“What would you have us do, then?” old Kirna snapped at him. “You heard what it said after it ate Adar. One sheep a day, or one person, and it doesn’t care which!”
“We need to kill it,” Wuller’s father said.
“Go right ahead, Wulran,” someone called from the darkness. “We won’t mind a bit if you kill it!”
“I can’t kill it, any more than you can,” Wuller’s father retorted, “but surely someone must be able to! Centuries ago, during the war, dragons were used in battle by both sides, and both sides killed great numbers of them. It can be done, and I’m sure the knowledge isn’t lost...”
“I’m not sure of that!” Kirna interrupted.
“All right, then,” Wulran shouted, “maybe it is lost! But look at us here! The whole lot of us packed together in the dark because we don’t dare light a proper council fire, for fear of that beast! Our livestock are taken one by one, day after day, and when the sheep run out it will start on us — it’s said as much! Already we’re left with no smith but a half-trained apprentice boy, because of that thing that lurks on the mountain. We’re dying slowly, the whole lot of us — would it be that much worse to risk dying quickly?”
An embarrassed silence was the only reply.
“All right, Wulran,” someone muttered at last, “what do you want us to do?”
Wuller looked at his father expectantly, and was disappointed to see the slumped shoulders and hear the admission, “I don’t know.”
“Maybe if we all attacked it...” Wuller suggested.
“Attacked it with what?” Pergren demanded. “Our bare hands?”
Wuller almost shouted back, “Yes,” but he caught himself at the last moment and stayed silent.
“Is there any magic we could use?” little Salla, who was barely old enough to attend the meeting, asked hesitantly. “In the stories, the heroes who go to fight dragons always have magic swords, or enchanted armor.”
“We have no magic swords,” Illuré said.
“Wait a minute,” Alasha the Fair said. “We don’t have a sword, but we have magic, of a sort.” Wuller could not be certain in the darkness, but thought she was looking at her sister Kirna as she spoke.
“Oh, now, wait a minute...” Kirna began.
“What’s she talking about, Kirna?” Pergren demanded.
“Kirna?” Illuré asked, puzzled.
Kirna glanced at the faces that were visible in the lantern’s glow, and at the dozens beyond, and gave in.
“All right,” she said, “but it won’t do any good. I’m not even sure it still works.”
“Not sure what still works?” someone asked.
“The oracle,” Kirna replied.
“What oracle?” someone demanded, exasperated.
“I’ll show you,” she answered, rising. “It’s at my house; I’ll go fetch it.”
“No,” Wulran said, with authority, “we’ll come with you. All of us. We’ll move the meeting there.”
Kirna started to protest, then glanced about and thought better of it.
“All right,” she said.
3
The thing gleamed in the lantern-light, and Wuller stared, fascinated. He had never seen anything magical before.
The oracle was a block of polished white stone — or polished something, anyway; it wasn’t any stone that Wuller was familiar with. A shallow dish of the smoothest, finest glass he had ever seen was set into the top of the stone, glass with only a faint tinge of green to it and without a single bubble or flaw.