Dragon Champion

Auron thumped his wounded tail, hard, on the reverse side of the rock. The man whirled, but only a small portion of Auron’s head and neck was visible. He watched the man through one barely open eye. “Will you face an armed man, creature, as fiercely as you did a child hardly able to walk?” The man’s spiny helm searched to and fro, moving like a weather vane rather than like living flesh.



Auron faced him, shooting his head forward and vomiting flame. The man threw his armored elbow before the eye slits in his armored mask as he knelt behind another rock, but too late. Auron’s fire coated him in a cascade of yellow-orange liquid. Spent and pained, Auron inhaled smoky air into his one good lung and slipped off the rock.



He saw a tower of flame rise. The fire slipped from the Dragonblade’s armor like surf from a sea turtle’s back. Somehow, the man lived. Drakossozh came at him, spear point held to skewer and kill. “All you’ve burned is the sash, with the names of those in Sarsmyouth you murdered stitched into it. But they remain in my memory. Tirea, the child, Guldan, the fisherman . . . ,” he recited, swinging the sword to kill.



Auron writhed under the blade and shot between two rocks, snapping off the arrow in his side in a flash of red pain. The man brought his sword down as Auron ran, lung filled with blood and agony, and he felt as though his tail had been stepped on. It did not hinder him, and Auron leaped atop another rock. An arrow shot under his neck.



The Dragonblade shouted, and Auron saw silver helmets and spear points bobbing among the rocks. The Dragonblade hopped upon the tallest boulder, leaping as nimbly as an elf even in his smoldering armor, and he continued to bellow orders. They were answered by the archers—one fired a flaming arrow in Auron’s direction. It struck a tree trunk and burned, throwing off bright sparkles that hissed as they landed on mist-wet stone.



Each breath was agony, and Auron ceased running so he could get air in his body. A mountain man blew his horn, and Auron saw spears pointed in his direction. He noted dully that a third of his tail had been chopped off.



“Why you’re hardly worth skinning!” Drakossozh bellowed, laughing. “Those fishermen made you out to be a sea monster of awesome size and ferocity. When I found one of your teeth, I wondered. I’m proved right. Again.”



“Do you always talk your dragons to death?” Auron said, further pain coming with the words.



“No. But with your death, I will have taken all the colors, save black. There will be feasting and dancing tonight, as you rotate on a spit. Headless, for I must have my trophy.”



Auron flirted with the thought of whipping his neck down to shatter his skull on a rock, but turned so that the man might try to take his head. He cried the best dragon roar he could, but it was hardly loud or fierce, and it ended with a bloody cough.



“Your men wait for you. None seem eager to approach,” Auron said. The men ringed him, but none threw spear or shot arrow.



The Dragonblade jumped down from his perch and strode toward Auron, a wisp of smoke or two still coming from nooks in his armor. Mountain men fell in behind him, gripping their climbing picks two-handed.



Horses screamed in the distance and thundered out of the mists. Auron turned his head, trying to pierce the fog that had turned the land into shadow and hint. A boy with a torch ran among the horses, looking fearfully over his shoulder. Two dogs trailing their leashes ran for the rocks, tails tucked beneath legs. Pairs of glowing eyes reflected light from the gloom.



“Firelong! Firelong!” a voice in the fog howled. “Tell me you still live, or I’ll tear out the throat of every man, dog, and horse here. Answer, O my good wolf.”



It was Blackhard. Auron felt his heart pound.



“Blackhard! Brother!” he howled, as best he could.



The Dragonblade raised his spear for a throw, but a white-haired mountain man put a restraining arm on his shoulder. “Sir,” the oldster said in Parl, “those are the voices of wolves, calling for the beast, and the dogs whimper in fear. Look away from the rocks. Some magic in the dragon draws them.”



Groups of mist-dampened wolves stood like a gray tide at the edge of the boulder-fall. Ears quivered; lips pulled back to reveal rows of shining white teeth. The Thing growled as one wolf, a sound that could freeze even the sap in the trees.



“Let the beast go, I tell you,” the mountain man urged. “Hardly a man is left in the villages; if the wolves run mad, it will be the death of my valleys. Let the hunt end.”



“The dragon may go!” Dragonblade yelled to the assembled men. He removed his helmet, revealing a thick-skinned face as tough as a grandfather oak. Sword-hard green eyes set off tight rust-colored curls gray at the temples. The eyes locked on Auron. “But the hunt will go on. Another day.”



Auron drew a wheezing breath. “So be it.” He turned and limped to the wolves.



As night fell, Blackhard nuzzled him.



“I didn’t like the look of things after you left. My heart and conscience both troubled me. There were men riding everywhere. But the real insult: those collar-fool hounds running free in our forests, scaring every elk and caribou for miles. The dogs had the gall to mark every third tree, as if they owned the woods. I called Thing, and found the same outrage had been committed from the three-rivers to the ice passes. Man can do as he likes in his fields and meadows, but the wolf-woods are another matter. Thing decided to teach them a lesson, and we knew that where you were, the men would be. We closed on them even as the men gathered around you.”



Thing had since dispersed, and the Dawn Roarers rested on an island surrounded by marshland. Not even a fox could track them here.



“I’d be turning on a spit if it weren’t for you, brother. This good wolf is grateful,” Auron said. Feybright licked the wounds at his chest, and Highway the stub of his tail.



“As you should be, Auron,” Blackhard said. “Stay with us awhile, in the forests of the Dawn Roarers.”



“Soon I’ll be making so much noise, every deer for miles will run. It wouldn’t be good hunting. Don’t forget the smell.”



“It gets worse every day,” Blackhard admitted. “You reek like a man’s tallow light. How can you stand yourself?”



“ ‘A dragon knows not his own strength, or smell,’ ” Auron quoted.



“Another proverb? Dragon saws aren’t very practical. Now the humans would have done better to learn one or two words of wolf wisdom. ‘Ware where when lift leg,’ for example.”



Auron laughed, wolf-style, and coughed up more blood. But only a little.



Chapter 12



Six rainy days later, Auron followed the road south, remembering Blackhard’s words: “It doesn’t look it in this part of the forest, but to the south this road joins another from the coast, and becomes an ancient road from long ago, even as men think of time, older in this land than wolves. It’s the fastest way back to the southlands.”



He’d decided against another climb. His wind was short with the wound to his chest, and his hunger trebled. Physical hurts aside, the Dragonblade’s men were crawling across the western slopes of the mountains like ants on rotten melon. He’d try his luck south before attempting the mountains again.



The wolf was right: the road did not look like much. The trail consisted of a pair of ruts winding between tree stump and hillside, surrounded by beaten-down weeds. Stone markers bordered it here and there, leaning like loosened teeth. Whoever had made it knew their business: the road cut through hillsides and had embankments built under it at depressions, and the vestiges of cut-stone bridges still stood alongside fords used these days. Here and there, water and wind had scoured away the dirt and detritus to paving stones beneath. The road’s makers must have cut down a mountain to construct it.



The drake wanted to get away from Drakossozh and his men in this land between mountains and coast, and the wolves said this road would guide him away quickly. He could try the mountains again where they were lower, at the gap where he’d been born. He moved along it, keeping to the trees. Once out of the forest, he’d have to worry about circling around villages, but that could be done at night. If the Dragonblade still sought him, he would hunt to the heart of wolf country, not in lands inhabited by other men. His wounds had turned to scars, but his lung had not completely healed: he still found himself out of breath and needing a nap after the short lengths of his journey.



His parents had told him drakes wandered aimlessly. But Auron had a purpose. He’d find NooMoahk, learn the secret weakness of which Hazeleye had spoken. The Dragonblade and those like him were probably using it to clear the mountains of his kind. Perhaps he could overcome the weakness the way he’d overcome his lack of scales (so far!). Then when it came time for him to mate, his clutch would be taught it, as well.



He saw only one group using the road to move north: cloaked, sandaled humans stepping into the forests, behind another cloaked man on a horse singing a marching song. Auron would have thought nothing of them, except the rider’s horse bore an emblem stretched on a fly-blanket across its face: the little man in the golden circle. He hurried away as fast as he safely could—that emblem had brought him nothing but unhappiness in the past, and the farther away he fled from it, the better.