Dragon Rule - E. E. Knight [112]
“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 him by inflating her long lungs and bellowing. His bellow was loud enough 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 Ayafeeia, of the Imperial Line, one of the most devoted-to-duty dragonelles Wistala had ever known. She’d pledged herself hearts-and-spirit to the Firemaids and had led them in battle after battle.
Wistala couldn’t imagine what kind of catastrophe would take Ayafeeia from her comrades.
Now she lay pinned by a great boulder put across her neck, trapping her on her side in the cave.
Wistala put her spine under the rock, ready to carfully shift it off her former commander in the Firmaids, when DharSii grunted and pointed with his tail.
A horrible sort of leech clung to Ayafeeia’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,” Ayafeeia 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. Ayafeeia 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 Ayafeeia and the splatter of dragon-blood striking the floor of the cavern.
“If I die, there’s a message—” Ayafeeia said.
“Go’ eh,” DharSii said through locked teeth.
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.”
“That bad?” Ayafeeia managed.
“I’d rather eat poison ants,” DharSii said.
Wistala shifted the rock.
“Thank you,” Ayafeeia groaned, able to raise her head.
“Wistala, find some dwarf’s beard 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, Ayafeeia? Why did you come here? What’s happened to the Firemaids?”
“Lavadome. Tearing itself . . . apart. Firemaids—broken up,” Ayafeeia managed.
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’d as Queen-Consort once directed the defense of the Lavadome against an invasion, who’d 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 decisionmaking, the ceremonies over the dead and the praise to the heroic living . . .
She didn’t miss any of it one bit.
She’s 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