Tobas was also watching the dragon, trying to decide what to do next, run, stay hidden, or use the Combustion again.
“Good work, Tobas,” Peren said, the albino suddenly close at his side. “Can you do anything else, anything that might kill it?”
“No,” Tobas admitted. “I only have that one spell with me.”
“Try it again, maybe you can set the beast on fire.”
Tobas shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve heard that dragons are fireproof, especially fire-breathing ones. They have to be. If I hadn’t caught it off guard and ignited its own fuel, I don’t think my spell would have done anything at all.”
“Try it anyway,” Peren insisted.
“All right.” Tobas raised his athame, fished out another pinch of brimstone, and threw his spell.
Sparks spattered harmlessly from the dragon’s flank for a moment, but nothing more. The monster did not even seem to feel anything. Tobas tried again, aiming for the dragon’s face; but with its mouth held tightly closed, the creature was protected; sparks showered ineffectually from its jaw.
“No,” Tobas said. “I didn’t think so. I can’t do anything more to harm it.”
“What do we do, then?” Arden asked.
“We wait,” Peren replied. “If it comes toward us, we run.”
The dragon was not coming toward them. It was pawing at its mouth again, apparently in some discomfort, even though the fire was out. The pawing did not seem to be doing any good; after a moment, it reared back and roared, spitting out a tongue of flame half the length of its own body, then spread its wings, flapping vigorously. Tobas suppressed a gasp at the sight of its wingspan, which he guessed to be over a hundred feet. It fluttered clumsily off the ground, wings beating wildly, and managed to get twenty or thirty feet up before making a crazy sideways swoop down the hillside.
Tobas watched it go with inexpressible relief. Until the moment it took off, he had not believed it could fly at all, even in the awkward fashion it had just displayed; that aerial ability added to its terribleness.
He guessed, from the direction it took, that it was heading for a small lake that the four young men had passed that morning; the unexpected mouthful of flame must have given the monster a sore throat. He was inexpressibly grateful that the creature had not been angry enough to set the forest ablaze out of spite.
When the dragon had flapped off down the hill and was safely out of sight, he turned and said, “Let’s get out of here; when it’s feeling better it’s likely to come looking for us.”
Arden and Peren immediately nodded agreement; Arden helped the still-dazed Elner to his feet, and together the four of them set out into the forest with no goal in mind save to put as much distance as possible between the dragon and themselves.
CHAPTER 14
When the four youths were all satisfied that the dragon was safely behind them, they settled on the banks of a small, gurgling stream almost a league northwest of the site of their confrontation with the beast. By mutual consent, they collapsed to the ground and for several long minutes they simply rested, drinking from the stream and gnawing on dried apples from Peren’s pack.
When he felt himself able to breathe without effort again, Tobas raised himself up on one elbow and said admiringly, “That was a brave thing you did, Peren, dragging Elner away from the dragon.”
Peren shrugged, his face pink, though whether with embarrassment or exertion Tobas could not be sure.
“Thank you,” Elner said. “You saved my life.”
Peren still said nothing.
“I didn’t know dragons got so big!” Arden said. “I saw one once in the Arena, during Festival, and it wasn’t anywhere near that size.”
“My father told me they come in all sizes,” Tobas said, thinking in particular of one of Dabran’s visits during his childhood, when he had asked whether pirates ever met dragons or sea monsters. His cousins had told him more about dragons over the years than his father ever had, but it was his father’s words he remembered.
“I wish my father had told me that,” Elner said. “I didn’t have any idea; I just thought that all the stories must be exaggerated. My mother used to say that half of every good story is exaggeration. I saw a twelve-foot dragon once, in the Arena, I guess it was the same one you saw, Arden, and I was pretty sure I could handle something that big. I didn’t know they got any bigger. The dragon’s handler said it was an adult; he claimed it had laid eggs. My father took me around to talk to him after the show, and the handler told me that his dragon was full-grown. I believed him, so I was sure I could handle a dragon and that all the stories were exaggerated.”
“I wondered why you seemed so sure of yourself,” Tobas said.
“Maybe that one you saw in Ethshar was full-grown,” Peren suggested. “If it laid eggs, it was a female; the males might be much larger.”
“Was that one we just saw a male?” Arden asked.
“Who knows? How does one tell with dragons?” Peren answered. “Or maybe they come in all sizes, like dogs or fish,” Tobas suggested again.
Elner listened, blushing. “I guess I made a fool of myself, didn’t I?” he said.
Tobas had enough tact to not answer that directly. Instead, he asked, “Why did you want to be a dragon slayer in the first place?”
“Oh, I don’t know... no, that’s not true. I wanted to show my parents that I could make it on my own. They’re rich, you know, my mother’s father was the Lord Magistrate of Westwark, and my father owns three ships and a warehouse. I lived comfortably, if you know what I mean, didn’t go out of my way looking for an apprenticeship or a rich marriage or anything, didn’t join the Guard or anything stupid like that, and my father kept asking when I was going to make something of myself, and my mother kept worrying that I’d get in trouble somehow if I didn’t do something with my time. I got fed up with their nagging, finally, and decided to do something to impress them. Killing this dragon seemed easy enough; I didn’t know it would be so big, and I thought the fire- breathing part was a myth.” He shook his head. “I guess it didn’t work.”
Tobas said thoughtfully, “Oh, I don’t know; you tried, anyway. You don’t need to tell them all the details. Just tell them that you stood your ground and faced the dragon alone when all the others fled, but that it was too big for you actually to kill by yourself.”
“But I froze! I was too scared to run!”
“Why tell them that?”
Arden chimed in, “I won’t tell anyone.”
Something occurred to Tobas suddenly. “Arden,” he asked, “what did you see around the rocks there before the dragon came after you?”
Arden shrugged. “Not much. There’s a little flat area — not a plateau, really, it’s too small for that — and it looks as if there was a village there once, but it’s just cellar holes and loose stones now. And there’s a cave back in the other side of that cliff, and that’s where the dragon was.”
“That’s probably its lair,” Tobas said.
“I don’t know,” Arden said. “Its just a cave, I think.”
“You couldn’t have seen much of it, though.”
“Well, no...”
“And what does a dragon’s lair look like, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Arden admitted.
“I think that’s the dragon’s lair, then,” Tobas declared.
Nobody argued the point further.
After a long moment of silence, Elner asked, “Well, what do we do now?”
Tobas hesitated, but finally asked, “Do you still want to go after the dragon?”
“By all the gods in Heaven and the demons of Hell, of course not!” Elner declared. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
