She vomited fire and the troll pulled itself in a new direction with one of its arm-legs. As she passed overhead, claws out and wings high and out of reach, the troll lashed up. Tail and leg-arm struck with a sound like tree limbs breaking.
An orange flash, and this time DharSii was atop the troll. He severed the sense-organ stalk with a sweep of his
sii
and the troll tumbled, righted itself, and ran blindly into a limestone cut.
The troll bounced back and fell, a buzzing beetle-wing noise coming from its lung-plates as the bellows forced air across the vulnerable flesh.
Still, the troll fought, lashing out with leg-arms and arm-legs, but blinded and deafened against two dragons the contest was hopeless.
She and DharSii stood far enough apart that they just might touch wingtips, making a perfectly equal triangle with the wildly swinging troll. They raised their heads in unison, lowered their fanlike
griff
to protect delicate tissue of ear and neck-hearts, and spat, eyes as slits with water-membranes down and nostrils tightly clenched.
The thin streams of oily-smelling flame made a hot, low roar of their own as they met at the troll, painting it in bright hues of blue, red, orange, and yellow. Black smoke added a delicate spiderweb framing to the inferno of sizzling flesh and sputtering flame.
They had the troll engulfed in fire before it could pick itself up from the stony slope. It still writhed about horribly as the heat consumed muscle.
Big-footed rabbits fled in panic from the heat, which set puddles of water asizzle and cracked rock. Birds shot out of the patches of yellow-and-white-flowered meadow about the mountainside.
The dragons ignored them, leaning against each other and crossing necks as they caught their breath. The spreading dark smoke seemed to stain the iron-colored clouds above like blood dark against a sword’s edge.
The stench of burning troll was as bad as Wistala remembered. Unpleasant business, but it had to be done if the Sadda-Vale’s hatchlings, and dragons, were to eat the herds they and their blighter servants tended.
“You arrived just in time, my gem,” DharSii said. “Long-fingers had one more trick behind his ears for me.”
“Next time, let me follow the troll-tracks while you watch from the skies.”
“Trolls interest me,” DharSii said. “Look at them, my jewel. In form and function they’re like nothing else in the world.”
“Couldn’t the same be said of dragons?” Wistala asked.
“Well, there are great birds, as you know—the Rocs, for instance. I’ve seen art in bestiaries of two-limbed dragons—wyverns, though they appear to be incapable of breathing fire, but the record is vague on that matter and there’s no way to settle it, as they appear to be extinguished from our world.”
“I wish the same could be said for trolls.”
DharSii panted. Wistala let him breathe, suppressing her need to reassure herself that he’d come through the ordeal safe of body and sound of mind. DharSii had had a scare, and soon covered it with analysis. “The interesting thing about trolls is the ancient hominid books have no record of them. There’s plenty on dragons, Rocs, even fanciful creatures like winged lions. Anything that carries off livestock and a hunter here and there is bound to be the subject of some interest. Yet the best dwarf compilers of arcana are mute on trolls, which have huge appetites and are very difficult to corner and kill.”
“I know. Mossbell was plagued by one when I was a drakka.”
She’d grown up on a gentle elf’s lands. The elf Rainfall had been like a father to her after she’d lost her own to war with the Wheel of Fire dwarfs.
“Odd that they have no relatives. Think of all the varieties of fish in the sea—they’re broadly similar in form. Reptiles, cats big and little. The insects that live in and above the earth, the variety of four-legged herbivores, rodents, two-legged hominids—all come in a range of forms. Where are the smaller troll cousins, the heavier ones, the ones adapted to living in the surf, as seals and sea lions have?”
Wistala found the question interesting but the need for discussing it curious. DharSii was a dragon of strange obsessions. Perhaps this was the reason he’d never quite fit in anywhere—the Lavadome, here in the Sadda-Vale, or while serving hominids as a mercenary warrior. She found it charming. In all her travels among the beasts, hominids, and dragons of the earth, she’d never found anyone quite like him. Powerful but open and friendly, intelligent but not pompous—well, rarely pompous—well traveled and experienced but still full of a young drake’s wonder.
“Odd, too, that they don’t appear to communicate, socialize. I’m not even sure how they mate, or if they do.”
“They plant a young in a corpse, something big and meaty. I saw a young one once, in a piece of a whale,” Wistala said. She’d cleaned out the troll’s cave after disposing of the troll. Bad business, killing young, but she’d regretted the necessity, not the result. Without the troll, the lands around Mossbell were prospering.
“What’s in its hands?” DharSii sniffed. “My jewel, you didn’t tell me you were wounded.”
“I wasn’t. A bruise or—”
“This is dragon-scale in its claws. Look, there’s another at that mouth-vent orifice. Green.”
“Green? The only other female here is Aethleethia. You don’t suppose—”
“Aethleethia hunt trolls? Not even if our hatchlings were starving. Oh, I’m sorry—”
They had an agreement not to speak of the hatchlings as theirs. Too much pain in that. Better to pretend, like the rest of the Sadda-Vale, that Aethleethia had laid the eggs.
Not that there weren’t still issues with their upbringing.
DharSii and AuRon had almost come to blows about having the hatchlings fight. Male hatchlings instinctively turned on one another as soon as they came out of the egg in a struggle for dominance of the clutch. AuRon and RuGaard had killed their red sibling together before turning on each other. AuRon won that contest. RuGaard survived despite crippling injuries. The rivalry echoed to this day. DharSii believed the tradition, being based on instinct, was part of a dragon’s natural heritage and should be respected.
Finally her brother RuGaard, crippled in his front
sii
since the hatchling duel with AuRon, pleaded with Aethleethia and her mate, NaStirath. NaStirath was a silly dragon who treated everything as a joke and had no opinion, though Wistala would always be grateful to Aethleethia, who’d been taking counsel from DharSii all her life, for defying him on this issue.
“The more hatchlings, the better for us,” she’d said.
Giving up her eggs to Aethleethia rankled. Wistala would have liked nothing better than to care for her own hatchlings, but her position, and her brothers’as refugees from the Dragon Empire in the Sadda-Vale, demanded that she accept the bitter bargain.
Scabia, with some eggs around her in the great round emptiness at Vesshall at last, could not care less how Wistala spent her time once the eggs came. She could spend all the time she liked with DharSii, even though publicly she was NaStirath’s mate.
She even suspected that she and DharSii could appear openly as mates, but the suspicion wasn’t strong enough for her to engage in what a human might call “rocking the boat.” Too much depended on Scabia’s goodwill toward her and her brothers.
“So if it didn’t come from you, who does this scale belong to?”
“Let’s find out,” Wistala said. “We followed the troll-tracks in one direction, I think we may go in the other equally easily.”
“Happily. The sooner we leave this smell behind, the sooner my neck will recover.”
“Poor little drake. Good thing you’re so taut. Being stiff-necked about everything was good training.”
“Ha-hem,”
DharSii grunted.
The trail gave out halfway up the mountain.
“Now what?” Wistala asked.
DharSii answered her by inflating his lungs and bellowing. His bellow was loud enough that she tracked echoes even from the other side of the lake.
“That may even bring RuGaard running,” Wistala said.
A faint cry answered.
They found the troll-cave, a little quarter-moon cut in the rock. DharSii made it through easily enough, but Wistala had to twist to fit. She had always been a muscular dragon-dame, stronger than either of her brothers.
They found the source of the green scale. She was a dragon familiar to Wistala, her own sister removed by mating through RuGaard. Incredibly, it was Yefkoa of the Lavadome, one of the fastest dragonelles Wistala had ever known. She’d pledged herself hearts-and-spirit to the Firemaids and fought in battle after battle.
Wistala couldn’t imagine what kind of catastrophe would take Yefkoa from her sworn sisters. Now she knew: Yefkoa lay pinned by a great boulder across her neck, trapping her on her side in the cave.
Wistala put her spine under the rock, ready to carefully shift it off her former commander in the Firemaids, when DharSii grunted and pointed with his tail.
A horrible sort of leech clung to Yefkoa’s torn-away skin. It was a newborn troll, or at least that’s what Wistala guessed it was. It resembled a full-grown troll about as much as a tadpole resembled a frog. It looked to be in the process of burrowing under her skin.
“What do we do?” Wistala asked.
“Get it out, please,” Yefkoa said. “I think the troll put it there, I thought it was eating me at first. I can feel it moving.”
“Grip it with your teeth, Wistala,” DharSii said.
She did so. Yefkoa screamed in pain.
“It’s tearing into me. Biting!”
“This is going to hurt. Prepare yourself,” DharSii said, extending his sharpest and most delicate
sii
.
Wistala had to close the eye facing him. She heard more cries from Yefkoa and the splatter of dragon-blood striking the floor of the cavern.
“If I die, there’s a message—” Yefkoa said.
“Go’ eh,” DharSii said through locked teeth.
Go ahead.
She heard him spit something out and opened the eye facing him. The troll-tadpole lay on the floor, giving a residual twitch now and then.
“And I thought the smell was bad! I shall never get this out of my mouth,” DharSii said, spitting
torfs
of flame in an effort to burn out the taste. “They taste like no other flesh.”
“Better in your mouth than my hide,” Yefkoa managed.
“I’d rather eat poison ants,” DharSii said. He kept extending and retracting his tongue. The flapping tongue reminded Wistala of a dirty rug being shaken out by a blighter.
Wistala shifted the rock.
“Thank you,” Yefkoa groaned, able to raise her head.
“Wistala, find some dwarfsbeard for this,” DharSii said. “I believe I saw some on the downed tree where we first saw the troll-tracks. Who knows what kind of filth this thing left in the wound.”
“In a moment. What do you need to tell us, Yefkoa? Why did you come here? What’s happened to the Firemaids?”
“Lavadome. Tearing itself . . . apart. Firemaids . . . broken up. Ayafeeia begs your help . . . and attendance,” Yefkoa managed to say.
Had she gone mad from the pain?
“We can talk later,” DharSii said. “Let’s see to the wound.”
Wistala squeezed herself out of the troll-cave and flew downslope.
She, who as Queen-Consort had once directed the defense of the Lavadome against an invasion, who had held the Red Mountain pass with a handful of Firemaids against the Ironrider hordes, now waged campaigns against trolls and hurried to find dwarfsbeard to patch a painful but minor wound.
The terrible methodology of war, the chaos and life-and-death decision making, the ceremonies over the dead and the praise to the heroic living . . .
She didn’t miss any of it one bit.
She would so much rather be trading philosophy with DharSii after a good dinner, or watching birds go about their clockwork routines, or trying her voice at poetry.
Alighting at the fallen tree, she searched for the ropy mass of dwarfsbeard. Yes, there it was, a thick tangle of hair run wild on an ancient dwarf. When broken and pulled apart, the thick white glue, like a thicker and stickier dandelion milk, acted on wounds, both cleaning them and speeding healing.
Unlike on her long-ago errands with her father to gather dwarfsbeard, now she simply broke off the rooted end of the trunk, thick with water that was pooling and rotting out the wood, and flew back, holding the piece of tree tight under her chest. They could pluck it off the stump at leisure.
She returned and found Yefkoa unconscious.
“Just as well,” DharSii said. “With that skin missing and torn, it must be painful. She won’t have an easy recovery.”
“I doubt she’ll be able to move,” Wistala said. “We’ll have to fly some blighters up here to tend to her wounds and sew her up again.”