The Shadow Companion - Laura Anne Gilman [47]
“What happened?”
“She just keeled over,” Gerard said, clearly concerned. Ailis was sweating even more fiercely now, her skin pale and shining in the darkness.
“Was…too much, somehow. I don’t know why. I could feel the power…and then it just went away, all fast and sudden and…”
“And she fell over.”
The salamander practically jumped off Newt’s neck in his hurry, wiggle-walking to get to Ailis. She automatically put out a hand to catch it.
“Hey…”
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I think…I got some of that from you, didn’t I? I was right about you being magic. But away from fire, you can’t do much, can you?”
“What?” Newt was confused.
“Ailis thinks…from the way it reacted—or didn’t react—to fire, it’s magical,” Gerard explained.
Newt started to protest, then the events came back to him, and his shoulders slumped. “Yeah. Fine. If he helps you, you keep him, then.”
The salamander made a squeaking noise, and Ailis shook her head. “He’s yours. He chose you. I don’t think he’d be interested in me at all, except when I’m using magic.”
“If you’re sure…”
She managed to laugh. “He is,” she said. Sure enough, once Constans had determined that Ailis wasn’t doing anything interesting, he seemed determined to crawl back onto Newt’s shoulder.
“All right.” He reached out to scratch the creature under its wedge-shaped head. “But if you need him…”
“Friends, we’re supposed to be looking for something that will lead us to the shadow figure’s true name,” Gerard reminded them, with his hand still under Ailis’s elbow.
She allowed him to help her up, leaning heavily on his shoulder with a mixture of gratitude and annoyance. She didn’t try to stand on her own just yet, but they moved forward together, with Newt and Constans a single step behind.
“Yeah. I’ll be okay. Just…a little dizzy,” she said as they walked down the wide cavern. The walls were as high and as pale as she remembered, though the footing did not seem quite as smooth.
“Too much magic,” Newt said. “You’re not as strong as you thought you were.”
“You always this sympathetic?” Ailis shot back in return, clearly irritated.
“Yes,” Newt replied, pleased to hear the color returning to her voice. “You hadn’t noticed?”
“Funny.” But she relaxed a little. He could see it in the way she moved.
“Humans!”
The bellow came out of the darkness ahead of them, where the cavern branched off into two smaller tunnels, and Ailis tensed up again immediately. To be fair, all four of them did, Constans included.
“Uh-oh,” Ailis said. “Guess he’s still around.”
“Dragon,” Newt explained to the salamander, who dove down the back of his tunic at the sudden, booming noise. “Not like you, even if he does breathe fire. Big fellow, larger than the griffin. Nasty temper, too. And smart. Best stay low in case he eats smaller cousins as well as humans and goats and horses.”
“He sounds angry,” Ailis noted.
“Well, he wasn’t exactly friendly the last time,” Gerard reminded them. “He wanted to eat us, remember?”
“He sounds angrier,” Ailis said nervously.
“Humans!”
Gerard had to admit the truth of that. The dragon also sounded like he was getting closer. Fast.
A flare of light deep in the left-hand passage and a blast of warm, foul-smelling air reached them.
“His breath hasn’t improved,” Newt said, gagging a little.
“Does it smell like he’s been…eating people recently?” Ailis wondered.
Nobody asked her how they were supposed to know what a man-eater’s breath would smell like.
“We could just go the other way,” Newt said.
“You mean avoid him?” Gerard asked.
“I mean run.”
“We can’t.” Ailis looked terrified, but was stubborn. Both boys recognized the stubborn part. “If what we’re looking for is here, the dragon might know about it.”
“And you think he’ll tell us? We barely found something to trade with him the last time, remember?” The thing they traded was, in effect, Gerard—or at least a future version of himself. “And we don’t even have horses to offer this time, either.”
Not that the dragon had been interested in horse-meat then.
The three friends looked