Draka

When I stepped out into the late afternoon sun it was a struggle to not launch myself into the air and throw myself after that bear, monster or not. A deep shame burned inside me. I knew, intellectually, that I could not have fought it. Not without any real warning and preparation. Maybe, maybe I could have distracted it while Rib and Pot fled, but more likely they would have done something heroically stupid and we would have all died. But I had fled. I had surrendered what was mine, the horses, my territory, to a beast, not even a human or another dragon, and the shame of it burned.

It didn’t matter if it had moved on. I had been angry about its, or its kin’s, presence in my territory even before it challenged me. Now I had to defeat it. I couldn’t tolerate anything else. Even if it had wandered on it knew now that it could return whenever it wished, and I had to show it that it was very, very wrong, even if that meant luring it back so that I could fight it.

We need to be clever about this, the voice told me, and I agreed. No matter how satisfying it might be, fighting the bear directly, tooth and claw, was not an option. I needed to use my strengths, to harass and misdirect, strike from the air and the shadows too suddenly and too fast for the thing to strike back. Even better if I could free my humans to help me, especially the… especially Herald. If I could put her somewhere safe with her bow, she should be able to hurt the thing with impunity. The others would have to remain inside the mountain or act mostly as spotters, since it would be foolish to risk their safety when it was unlikely that they could hurt the thing.

The poison, the voice reminded me, and it was a good point! If it could be made to stick to an arrowhead that would give us an edge. We’d see how the monster liked not having the use of a leg or two!

But first, I needed to find it.

Of course the damned thing was gone when I reached the camp site. I walked around, sniffing the air and the ground, and caught their scent easily, following it south along the tree line. It made sense. Since there was no blood and no horse carcasses around the campsite the horses must have fled, and they would have gone where the trees were least dense, I guessed.

It didn’t take long before I found bones with half the meat stripped from them. Poor thing. My pity didn’t stop me from tearing in and bolting down a couple of pounds of meat, though, only stopping when the voice reminded me that I had a bear to hunt and couldn’t afford to go into torpor. From the carcass the scent of bear turned into the forest, angling northeast, and I followed the trail as stealthily as I could, weaving my way among the trees and bushes.

I found them as twilight was setting in. In the middle of a glade there was a giant tree, the trunk splitting into branches several metres thick that stuck out along the ground in every direction before curving upwards. Each of the branches had a multitude of roots growing off it, and among this massive root system there was a den large enough even for the mama bear. I found her lying on the forest floor outside, still alert, her cubs presumably sleeping inside.

Good. Now that I knew where to find her, I just had to actually go through, and succeed, with the rest of my barely-formed plan.

It was dark when I arrived at the gate. I’d stopped every so often to make sure that the bear wasn’t following me – it had been too stealthy and clever by half – and I was secure in the knowledge that I was alone. When I opened the gate I was met with one question from Mak: “Is the forest safe?”

“As far as I can tell, yes,” I told her, to which she immediately turned to the others and said, “You heard her! Kira, we can go!”

To my great amusement the humans rushed out of the tunnel and into the forest without even a word to me, gathering at the campsite once they’d done what they had to and then continuing in a group to the stream to drink and refill waterskins. Only then did I actually manage to talk to them, telling them about my plan for the night.

Pot took the bad news about the horse I’d found stoically, but there was a fire in his eyes when I brought up my ideas for evening the odds. “If the poison works at all it should work on arrowheads as well as on a dagger. It dries pretty sticky,” he said. “It will take some preparation but it should work, especially if you aim for the limbs.”

“That’s not the concern,” Mak said. “Draka, are you certain about forcing a fight like this?”

“This is my territory,” I told them, making sure that my tone allowed no argument. “The bear has challenged me. It can flee, or it can die, but I will no longer tolerate it walking around my land.”

Herald, meanwhile, looked almost giddy with excitement. “Draka, do you realise what this means?” she said.

“What?”

“I get to fulfil my promise! We are finally going on that bear hunt! It took a little more than the two days that I said, but…”

Dear, reliable Herald. Of course that was what she’d think about. Not the danger, or whether it was necessary. She had made me a promise, and however late, she was going to keep it.

I grinned. If the others hadn’t been around I probably would have wrapped my neck around her, but I had an image to protect. “It’s about time, isn’t it?” I said. “Let’s find a good place for you to shoot from, Herald. Pot, prepare the arrows. Rib, you’re on guard duty. And all of you, stay close to the gate, just in case. I don’t trust that bear to stay put, and it may not be the only monster around. I never saw those wolves, either. Don’t hesitate to shut yourselves in, Mak.”

I got some nods and nobody argued, which was good enough for me.

“Do you have any ideas?” I asked Herald as we walked. “Concerns? Suggestions?”

“The first would be to ask how you plan to draw the bear to me,” she said. “If it has two cubs, I do not see it being easy to separate it from them.”

“I will just have to make it angry enough,” I told her. “I have some ideas for that. They mostly involve the cubs.”

“That is cruel, Draka,” Herald scolded. “They are innocent in this.”

“They are also already hundreds of pounds, and will grow into true monsters just like their mother. I cannot afford to have them around my mountain. But I do not need to kill or maim them for my plan to work, only threaten and frighten them enough to enrage the mother. And we do not even need to kill the mother, necessarily, if that is a concern, though you should remember what a threat all of them are to anyone living in this forest.”

“Ugh, I know, it is just… they are just babies.”

“Again, Herald, these babies are the size of fully grown bears. I am sorry, but killing them might be necessary.”

“Yes, fine,” she said, but just because she gave in didn’t stop her from pouting. It was surprising, honestly. I would have expected her to be more pragmatic when it came to dangerous monsters, but clearly the human love of fuzzballs transcended worlds.

“We will need a tall rock or a ledge,” Herald said, “But something that is climbable. Something that I can climb, rather, but that the bear cannot. I am not the strongest climber, but I have some practice.”

“The Terriallons did not tell you?” I asked.

“Tell me what?” she asked, all innocent curiosity.

Oh, that made me excited. She had no idea! “Climbing will not be a problem,” I told her with a grin. “Nor will escape, if it comes to that.”

“I know that grin,” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

“Oh, this is wonderful,” I told her, grinning even wider. “I was afraid that I would not be able to surprise you. I never thought those two would be able to keep their mouths shut!”

The woman screwed up her face in mock outrage. “Tell me!” she demanded, hands on hips.

“I will show you, as soon as we find an appropriate place for you,” I said happily. “We should not go too far, though. If we manage to wound it I want to bring the others to help finish it off, at least Mak with her spear.”

“Ugh, fine,” Herald said, but she kept looking at me suspiciously after that. She was going to love it when I finally showed her, I just knew it, and the anticipation made it so much better.

“How high do you think you can shoot from, accurately?” I asked a little later, considering a deep notch on the stone face.

Herald followed my eyes and considered. “It depends mostly on how close you can get the target, and how much it will be moving around. If we are looking at the same place, I would say that it is perhaps fifty feet up, so… a hundred fifty to two hundred feet should be doable. That is well into the trees, so that would add another complication, but doable. Though I am not sure how you intend to…”

Herald looked at me and fell silent. Her eyes flicked to my wings, then back to my eyes. She licked her lips and looked at my wings again, then back.

“No,” she said, but it was not a refusal. It was more like a question.

“Yes,” I said, grinning.

“No!” she grinned right back.

“Oh, yes!”

“That is how… you flew Kira here from the south! And that is… your nest is above the throne room! You flew them up, brought them from above!”

“They screamed their heads off!” I laughed.

“Finally?” she asked, kneeling next to me and taking my head in her hands. “I have been hoping… I did not want to ask in case you said no, and you were so small before, but now…” her face split with a fierce, anticipating joy. “Really!? You would not joke about this, would you?”

“I would not. I told you that I want to take you to my nest. To show you my hoard, and what I have done with the place. I think I can do it now.”

“I will get to ride a dragon,” she whispered. I could see actual tears in her eyes. It was amazing.

“Well… for this, right now, I will have to carry you. I do not think that I can land there properly to drop you off. But when we are done here, yes. I think that I could carry you. You can ride me.”

With Rib and Pot, having someone on my back had been uncomfortable and somewhat demeaning, but I tolerated it because it was necessary. With Herald, I was looking forward to it. I had been looking forward to it for months, and the fact that I felt this need to deal with the bear first annoyed me no end, making me even angrier at the thing.

“Shall we try, then?” I said. “Are you ready to fly, if only for a few feet?”

Herald squealed.

“Stand up and face the cliff with your arms out,” I told her. She did.

“Stand on your knees, with your arms out,” I corrected myself. She looked back and laughed at me, then knelt.

“Now,” I said and wrapped my arms tightly around her. “Hold on to my arms, but be ready to let go and try to push forward when I say ‘Drop!’ We do not want any accidents here.”

“Just go! Just go!” Herald said, wiggling excitedly.

“Hold on!” I kicked off as hard as I could, our shared excitement giving me strength to launch us both several feet into the air before I even beat my wings. Herald was a tall, strong girl, but she didn’t weigh as much as Rib and Pot together, and I rose quickly enough that I had to break almost immediately to not smash us both into the rock.

“Legs down!” I shouted to Herald as I hovered erratically in front of the ledge. She understood my intent perfectly, and with her legs down and a little forward, knees slightly bent, I descended forwards as carefully as I could.

“Alright! Wait for it… DROP” I shouted, releasing my grip on Herald as she simultaneously let go of my arms and boosted forwards with her hips, back pushing against me. This got her comfortably onto the ledge while I was pushed back and away from the rock.

It was damned perfect.

I hung in the air, swaying left and right as I beat my wings, and Herald spun around where she stood, laughing, before facing me. “It was like I leapt fifty feet straight up!”

“Glad you liked it!” I called back. “It worked well! Now we just need to get you down!”

She looked over the edge, then at the rock face to either side of the ledge. “I could slide, I think, if I had to. It would hurt, though. Help would be appreciated!”

Getting Herald down was a little trickier than getting her up there, simply because landing on the ledge in a way that didn’t end up with me falling backwards took several tries. I kept chickening out, until finally Herald decided the situation for us by throwing herself into my arms and wrapping her arms around my neck while I screamed in surprise and called her a lunatic. Fair enough; I got her to the ground in one piece, but I was more than slightly shaken by the experience. She, meanwhile, was just giddy with excitement, and there was no way that I was going to do anything to dampen the sheer childish joy that poured off her. I couldn’t even bring myself to be angry with her for scaring the crap out of me; all I could do was sit there and smile while she laughed and hugged me.

“Alright. Alright.” She broke into a fit of giggles. “Alright, we have a job to do. Oh, Mercies, that was fun! Let us get my bow and get me up there,” her eyes shone at the words, “and then you try to bring the bear over. And then we can fly again!”

I would have flown her to the gate and back again, but I wanted to save it. I wanted our first real flight to mean something, and there was only one place I had been dreaming of taking her. So we walked in a happy silence, our steps light.

Back at the gate the others were calm but watchful. Pot had stretched his poison to cover the heads of a full dozen arrows, Rib, Kira and Ardek were playing some kind of card game, although the ‘cards’ were thin pieces of wood and I wasn’t sure how they managed without being able to speak to each other. Mak sat by herself a little ways off, and came walking as we spoke to Pot, who wanted to know if we’d seen any sign of the horses. We hadn’t.

“Draka,” she said softly, “once you are done with this bear I need to talk to you.” I got the feeling that whatever she wanted to talk about was serious, so I nodded.

“I’ll come find you,” I told her. “What is it about?”

“Kira. But it can wait a few hours. She’s no threat, I’m sure of that.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I told her, and I could have sworn that I saw her swell a little at that expression of trust.

Herald and I returned to the ledge we’d chosen. It was dark and chilly, but we’d prepared with Mak’s darkvision spell and a blanket, so at worst Herald should be bored up there. Flying her up was a little more precarious than the first time, for several reasons. Mainly because she was wearing the armour she’d ordered way back, before we went north. She’d brought it with her when we first left Karakan for the mountain, but this was the first time I saw it, and it was, well, flattering. Both in the way it looked on her, and for me. I’m sure that it was a very effective suit of armour, but I couldn’t possibly ignore the style. Made of thick, flexible leather covered in hard overlapping scales and dyed a midnight black, the suit so clearly resembled my own natural armour that I couldn’t do anything but bear the extra weight with a smile. She also had her bow and arrows, as well as her light pack, and the sword on her hip didn’t make things easier. I’d questioned her about it, but she’d been very clear that “I am not leaving my Sorrows-beloved sword, and that is it!” Happily it only took one aborted attempt before we managed it. With a promise not to forget her up there I headed off into the forest, almost completely sure that I could find my way back to the bears. I didn’t remember the way exactly, with the forest not being full of distinguishing landmarks, so after a while I resorted to moving in a large, zig-zagging pattern until I picked up their scent on the ground and surrounding foliage, which led me to them quite quickly.

The bears were sleeping. They lay in their den under the gigantic windthrow, warm and cosy and safe, the cubs with their mother and she secure in the knowledge that nothing on this continent could possibly be foolish or arrogant enough to bother them. Clearly, she didn’t know me.