Dragon Champion

A boy—holding a harpoon taller than its bearer in his twiggy arms—lunged from a hiding place among the rolled nets. The point bit into his side. Auron lashed out with his tail, sending boy and weapon overboard. Pain driving him, Auron went into the ship’s wheel and ravaged it: he tore apart fittings, struck wheel and tiller ropes, and finally hurled the remains overboard before moving on to the hold. He splintered enough oil-soaked wood so that even the minuscule gobs of fire he could spit began to crackle and pop as they spread.



He crawled back to the rail and poked his head up. The other “hunting” boat with the harpoon men moved toward his as the other two fishing ships raised sail, abandoning their tangled nets and floated lines. Auron did not know if they were coming for him or to fight the fire—and he did not wait to find out. He went over the far side.



Water and Fire! The fishermen chased him even underwater. The men went headfirst into the water, broad shoulders making clumsy splashes, each holding a harpoon and quenching the fighting heat in his body with their courage. Auron plunged as far down as he could and clung flush to the rocky bottom. The men swam toward him for a moment, but perhaps had trouble seeing underwater, giving his camouflage an edge. The men could not hold their breaths long; they waved to each other and floated slowly toward the surface, back to back and harpoons ready to stab at whatever came from the murk. Swimmers from the other ships clung to the sides of the launch.



Auron accepted the draw and watched their little flat-bottomed boat row toward the larger ones. He came up to breathe and took in the havoc he had loosed. Two fishing boats burned. Horribly blackened bodies floated in the gentle waves of the bay under seagulls already dropping for a meal. A dissipating fire slick kept the birds from another body, probably that of the determined harpooner. Dolphins still circled in the water, nudging at the dead member of their family floating there. And something else. One bore the boy Auron had knocked overboard. The men had missed him in the confusion and smoke of burning ships.



Auron swam over, his nose, eyes, and crest cutting the water ahead of the swirl of his snakelike body. The boy floated facedown in the water, pale and unresponsive as the dolphins poked him again and again to the surface.



Hunger gnawed at Auron, despite the fading heat of battle. He took the dead or unconscious boy by the neck—breaking vertebrae as his jaws closed—and swam for the cliffs. A dolphin came close alongside for a moment of pale regard. Its eye held no merriment this time.



BOOK TWO



Drake



IF LEGENDS KNEW WHAT AWAITED,



THEY’D SPEND THEIR YOUTHS DIFFERENTLY.



—Naf Touraq



Chapter 10



The seaside days of plentiful fish, oyster, and lobster made Auron’s reacquaintance with hunger that much harder to bear.



He crossed rainswept, stone-studded, uninhabited country for two days after climbing the bay cliff. He sought the white tips of the faint mountains. All he found to eat were snails and slugs among and under the rocks. They were hardly worth the effort of time and tongue to find, given how many it took to make a mouthful.



“I’ll leave you for the birds,” he finally said to one snail creeping amid the flaky lichens of the rocks. Its antennae waved in the odor of his breath.



Auron had passed into drakehood in blood and flame. The realization didn’t come to him until the second night after the fight with the fishermen that, had Mother and Father been present, they would have recognized his first fire as a black-smoke symbol of his, and their, achievement—even as they drove him from their cave and territory. His wings were still years away, but according to his parents, these would be his wandering years. Drakes were supposed to range about on foot, finding new hunting ground, learning how to outfight—or outwit—their enemies.



Auron didn’t want any of it. He was proud of his first flame, but if some wizard could work spellcraft, he’d give it up, go back in time. He wanted to smell his mother again, or even Wistala, or hear the claws and scales of his father as he returned from a hunting trip.



But even wizardry couldn’t grant a drake’s wish. Mother and Father had gone the way of so many other great dragons. The weakness?



Auron wandered south and east. He found a few human trails, recognizing hoof- and footprints running north and south along the coast. Once he saw the smoke of a campfire and smelled the musty odor of burning peat, but hesitated to investigate further. He guessed it to be men, and after the bloody encounter with the fishing boats, the cautious voice of his mother’s wit told him to keep an eagle’s distance. By the third day, he saw forests staining the slopes ahead black across a stretch of land a little lower than the coastal hills. Trees meant game, though whether he was up to dashing down a deer remained to be seen. His appetite would settle for a sick hedgehog.



Water helped the hunger pangs. He drank from rain pools, the collar tinking as it scraped stones. There were thunderstorms, none so frightening as the first he experienced—yet more miserable from loneliness for Wistala than the noise and wet of the storm.



Another day passed in slinking across the hilly marshes brought him off the heights and into trees. Pines, communal trees that just touched each other with their branches as though looking for reassurance from others of their kind, gave the forest a pleasantly scented stillness in the gentle summer air. Between the rolling moraines flowed endless streams into lakes girded by poplar and birch; Auron made better time swimming across water than he did negotiating tree trunks. Hunting did not bring him much in the way of game. He found a rank-smelling pile of sticks at the edge of a lake and tore into it, only to find its builder fled. He was reduced to pulling up mice and voles from their shallow homes when the lakes yielded little but bony catfish and craws. He slept curled around a stone one morning, and was rewarded with an ambush of a summer-fed hare when his ear woke him to the sound of it chewing dandelion.



The moon waxed, bringing with it the sound of wolves as it rose each night. They were talkative creatures, singing back and forth to each other from hilltop to rockpile in sad, sonorous voices. Auron didn’t know much about wolves, except they looked something like the dogs of men: more dangerous in some ways, less so in others. Dogs brought men; wolves only called other wolves to their aid. Father had said something about groups of wolves being dangerous, so Auron took to sleeping in trees.



He still cut across man trails each day, old and rarely used, and they became older still as he traveled deep into the forest, always heading for the mountains until hunger forced him to forage. Now and then he came across cabins in glades. Bear pelts and wolf hides stretched across windows warned him of the fate of livestock raiders, so he stayed clear of the barns and coops. He trekked warily, avoiding any hint of man smell.



While doubling back from a strong man odor, he ran into wolves.



He was retracing his steps across a dry watercourse and up a rise no higher than a sapling when he came nose-to-nose with three of them. They were a lighter gray than he, with more closely set eyes and mouths that hung open in the summer warmth. A younger one, all paws and ears, joined his three elders. Auron caught flashes of movement at the corner of his eye; wolves slunk down the sides of the hill, heads and tails low to the ground. Auron crouched, putting the softer skin of his belly close to the ground.



Auron looked into the eyes of the nearest wolf, a crystal blue of such brilliant purity they reminded him of the gemstones his father gave his sisters. The eyes held a wary cunning; dangerous jaws dripped with hunger. Each waited for the other to make a move.



The nearest trees that would bear his weight stood at the top of the little knoll the four wolves occupied.



Auron made the first move, a leap up the hill with four claws splayed, hoping to scatter the predators with a sudden rush. The leader jumped sideways, whipping his body around in a snapping blur to sink his teeth into Auron’s throat. He caught hold of the thickest part of Auron’s neck, and the others joined in.



The teeth locked so fast, Auron felt no pain. Auron took advantage of his limber spine and turned around, rolling over on a wolf and injuring it enough for it to cry through clamped teeth. The young one caught Auron by the foreleg. Auron counter bit, crushing its skull in his jaws. The leader hung on with a determination that served the pack when bringing down a deer or an elk, but against a dragon, the death grip became just that. Auron rolled over and opened the wolf with his rear claws, tearing the leader from throat to hock. One of the flankers got a grip on his rear left leg, and Auron’s bloody front claws found its ear-and eyeholes. Red flesh came away as the grip of the wolf’s teeth relaxed in death.



Another bit at his face, not closing for a grip. Auron brought his neck up to get out of reach and bite back, but something tugged at him. Somehow, despite the disemboweling, the leader still held on. Auron pulled it off with his front claws, opening long wounds on the base of his neck. A wolf was atop his back, biting at the thicker hide along his spine, and Auron knocked him off with a crack of his tail. It flew against a tree, tumbled to the ground, and lay still.



Auron crushed the head of one of the injured ones trapped beneath him with both front paws. He felt blood flowing out of his neck. He and the last wolf exchanged a brief flurry of bites; Auron tore its ear, and the wolf bit off a length of his upper lip. The combatants stared at each other, Auron among a carpet of dead wolves and the other with paws spread, ready to leap in any direction.