not hear their words.
A long forked tongue dangled from the dragon’s mouth, open to show the rows of needle teeth. The mouth was wide enough to snap up three warriors at once, and those teeth were longer than any spear. Fringed ears flapped above eyes that glowed like fire, eyes that looked about alertly as though in search of something to eat. Behind, far behind the head, a clawed foot emerged, pushing the serpent slowly toward Karin.
3
She turned, hearing the scrape of scales on stone, and saw the dragon not a hundred feet behind her.
In a horrified second she took in the intelligent, burning eyes, the huge leathery wings folded down the back, the slow-moving neck and body, and the jaws that looked as though they could snap together very quickly around something soft and tasty.
She began to run, down the raiders’ track toward the salt river, holding up her skirt and taking huge, desperate breaths. The track zigzagged, descended, doubled back on itself so that for a few seconds she was actually approaching the dragon again from lower down the slope. Muscles rippling in its neck, it lowered its head toward her.
Then the track doubled around again. She sprang up and over a boulder in the path and kept wildly running. When her legs had to slow for a series of rough steps, she looked back to see the dragon lowering itself sideways down the slope, its clawed feet tumbling the rocks Eirik and his men had carefully levered into walls. She was running as fast as she could and it moved deliberately, not even having unfolded its wings, but its slow pace was still more rapid than hers.
Now she raced down a straight stretch, and a glance over her shoulder showed it gaining on her, sliding and scraping along the stones, its mouth open in anticipation. Faint cries came to her on the wind, so others must have spotted the dragon too, but she had no time to look for them.
She could not dodge it, and she was not going to be able to outrun it. The track turned sharply, away from the edge of a rock slide. Her only hope was to find a crevice narrow enough that the dragon could not follow. Karin sprang forward and over the edge, launching herself down a stone face so steep she immediately regretted it. She slid more and more rapidly, just managing to keep herself vertical, bouncing off stones in her path and grabbing at the stunted bushes that grew among the rocks to slow her slide.
At least, she thought, she would be dead before the dragon began to eat her.
She smacked feet-first into a dense brush and came abruptly to a halt. She looked up wildly to see the dragon’s fiery eye peering over the edge of the cliff she had just come down. Before her was a narrow crevice, narrower-maybe-than the dragon’s head. She plunged into it headfirst. It was pitch black, but her fear of being closed in was nothing compared to the needle teeth behind her.
The floor of the crevice was unexpectedly smooth to her scraped hands and knees. Karin crawled rapidly, deeper in, around several sharp curves. This was more than a crevice; this was a tunnel. Behind her came a rattling noise that sounded like the gnashing of long teeth. Karin crawled even faster. Daylight was completely gone and so, she hoped, was any chance that the serpent’s head could reach her.
She stopped at last, sobbing with fear and exhaustion. No wonder Wigla had given her such a strange look when agreeing to let her out of the castle. She had known that the potential rival for Eirik would be gone even more surely than she had expected. Karin could still hear a distant, echoing scraping and snuffling, but after a moment the sound seemed to move off.
She took a long breath then and leaned back against the strangely smooth stone wall, trembling and weak. In the distance she heard more shouts, muffled from where she was, then a horrible shriek abruptly cut off. Later, maybe tonight, she would try emerging from this crevice, try again to find her way back to the river, to see if the dragon had eaten Hadros and all his men.
And then, staring into blackness, she thought she could see a faint green light. For a second that light brought back visits to the faeys’ burrows, of conversations with beings who accepted her as she was, neither demanding her love nor seeking her life.
She shook her head sadly and blinked to get rid of that deceptive green light, but it was still there. This was strange. For a moment she thought it must be daylight filtered through green plants, but the faint sounds that accompanied that light were not the sounds of the outside world. They sounded like high voices.
Not daring to believe, she began crawling forward again. The light grew stronger, the voices more clear. “I tell you I heard somebody! You just heard the dragon! But this was somebody breathing, and I know what the dragon’s breath sounds like! Well, why don’t you go look then?”
The green light was approaching her, bobbing as though being carried, though the source was still hidden by a curve in the tunnel. And suddenly she came around the corner face-to-face with someone her size.
Both of them gave startled cries and pulled back. “I did hear someone!” the being before her shouted, crawling backwards rapidly. “And it’s got blood on it!”
“Wait! Don’t go!” she said, holding out a hand. “I won’t hurt you. I just got scraped on the rocks and bushes coming down the cliff. Are you- Are you a faey?”
It couldn’t be a faey, she thought; he was much too big. But he stopped his retreat, picked up the lamp again, and squinted at her. “What do you know of faeys?”
“Back in the southern kingdoms,” she said-of course everyone in Hadros’s lands considered themselves to be in the northern kingdoms, but up here everything else was south-“I was a friend of the faeys.” After a moment she added, “They tamed me.”
“It’s a tame mortal!” he called excitedly over his shoulder, then added reluctantly, “Or so she says.”
“That’s right,” she said eagerly. She had no idea what faeys were doing here, especially such large ones, but faeys meant safety.
He called back over his shoulder again, answering excited questions while keeping a careful eye on her. But at last he said, “As long as you’re here, would you like to wash off the blood? And would you like something to eat?”
Karin groped out of the tunnels by the insufficient light of the faeys’ lamps. Since it was now night, they reassured her, the dragon would have retreated to its lair and would no longer be a problem. “We never can understand why you mortals insist on being outside during daylight. Daylight is dangerous!” they told her.
And climbing around in the night was also dangerous. But there should be a moon for at least the early part of the night, she thought, and maybe, somehow, by morning she could find her way back to the salt river-that is, if the ship was even still there, if any of the men were still alive. Eirik and his men had, after all, taken her up to their fortress in no more than half an hour; all she had to do was find the path.
She felt strangely heartened by her day with the faeys. They had rubbed herbal pastes on her scrapes and bruises and fed her mountain blueberries. They might be almost as big as mortals up here in the north, but they were still the eager and easily-worried beings she had first known as a girl. If beings like this could exist even here, within a short distance of a dragon, then safety might not be as illusory as she sometimes feared.
Either that, or security by its very nature was only to be found in tiny pockets in the midst of danger.
Someone was standing just outside the tunnel. He stood quietly, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, a sword in his hand.
The faeys were instantly gone and their light with them, fading away back into their tunnel without a sound. Karin remained on hands and knees, just back from the entrance, considering. Whoever it was, he did not seem to notice her. He shifted, raising his head as though listening, then again took his waiting pose.
Her choices were to retreat with the faeys, she thought, spending perhaps many more days in their tunnels, or to come out and face whoever this was. If it was one of Hadros’s men, she should be safe with him. Eirik was a different consideration. But would Eirik be waiting quietly outside a faeys’ tunnel?
She could not stay underground forever, in spite of dragons and renegade kings. She felt at her belt, then remembered her knife was gone. Shaking her head, she rose to her feet anyway and came out of the tunnel.
And saw as he whirled toward her that it was Roric. She almost collapsed with relief as his arms went around her.
“The lords of voima be praised,” he murmured after a moment, drawing his lips back from hers. “I didn’t dare
