Seven clumps investigated later, he spied the characteristic spiny, tooth-edged leaves of an aloe plant wedged deep in a crack. Circling, he put down in the lee of the boulders, which stood shoulder-high to him, at eleven feet tall – his crouching height, which Dragons traditionally used for a shoulder measure. Here was a nice bolt-hole for the Princesses, a shallow, wind-carved nook occupied by a fat, sleepy-looking desert adder.
Dragon brained it with a talon and slid breakfast down his throat. Oh! Catching the tail with his fangs, he pulled the snake out and snipped off a chunk for his Riders. Humans needed to eat so frequently.
“Mmm, regurgitated snake meat?” Azania said drily. “Can’t wait.”
“I can pre-chew it for you if you’d prefer?”
“Don’t be lazy, Dragon. I prefer pre-digested at the very least.”
“Very good, Your Highness. Would you like your aloe juice masticated, too?” Extending a paw, he helped her slide Inzashu off his neck, asking, “Should we have waited at N’ginta to get her more treatment, do you think?”
“With or without a poisoned arrow in the back?”
“True.”
“Let me show you how to pulp and squeeze aloe juice. We need to get more into her and cover every inch of this rash as well, or it’ll burn and blister. Do we have any spare cloth?”
“I stole just the thing earlier.”
She admired the white silk sheet he had pinched. “Why, you wily reptilian reprobate!”
“You are talking to a Princess-stealing Dragon, Highness. I’m very talon-ted.”
His friend groaned on cue. “Ooh, terrible pun. Reminds me of that old joke, what did the cat drag-in?”
“I don’t know,” he said, playing along, “what did the cat drag in?”
“I don’t know either, but it gave me paws for thought.”
“Gnarr-harr-harr, that’s awful.”
Did she mean to cheer him up? Or to distract herself from the pain this poison was clearly putting her through? Dragon helped her treat her sister; when Inzashu half-woke from her stupor, they were able to urge her to deploy her magic with his help – strengthening her, he hoped. For the young girl to turn her sensory magic to healing was a perfectly natural process; for him, it was a struggle. After treating her skin and helping her to drink aloe juice diluted in water, they settled in the relative shadow of the boulder and rested through the heat of the day.
Dragon tested a couple of the green coldstones. Emeralds? Or perhaps, emeralds turned to a different use, he thought, sniffing pensively at the unfamiliar magic. The cooling effect was definitely noticeable within an area of approximately two feet. Under shade arranged to minimise heat transfer from the air, he estimated temperatures between eight and ten degrees cooler than outside. It must have been enough to allow the Skartun warriors to survive that first desert crossing; admittedly, nowhere near the hottest time of the year, when desert temperatures soared off the Fangheat scale.
Inzashu stirred in the early afternoon and declared that she felt somewhat better. They whiled away the hours swapping stories of a childhood spent on the run in Skartun, a cloistered royal upbringing in T’nagru and a Dragon’s hatchling and fledgling days in the Tamarine Mountains.
What vastly different experiences they had as youngsters.
In the evening, a blistering sunset of the white sun, Taramis, kept them under cover until later than Dragon had planned for. He also drank a little aloe juice to soothe his raw throat.
“Your fires?” Azania asked.
“Aye. I’m not sure if it’s getting better or worse.” Scratching his flank restlessly, he said, “Do you remember how Hammaria the Devastator told me that an egg never forgets its origins?”
The Princess nodded. “Was that what you used to find your fires, Dragon?”
“I was thinking about that, and how at Chakkix Camp, Yarimda said, Ocean always rises. That was what I experienced, but it wasn’t an easy or a natural process. I had to literally tear it free – squeeze, and strain and tear it loose, using the electrical power from their machine.”
“It did look agonising, but also glorious,” she said.
“Glorious?”
“Well, first of all your eyes started to bulge as if you’d sat on a cactus –”
Brraa-haa-haa! he laughed.
“And then I feared you were having an epileptic fit, and you were jerking all over the place and smoking from beneath your scales – almost as if that power burned off a coating of some kind. I can only imagine what it did to your insides, Dragon, yet you are still flying. I feared you would be fried to a crisp, especially when you made Jabiz Urdoo shoot you yet again – stop looking at me like that.” She shivered delicately. “I worry about you, alright?”
Abruptly, she stood, but had to brace herself against his cheek. “Ooh, that feels terrible.” The Princess touched the scales beneath his eye. “True strength, Dragon, comes from the heart.”
His turn to shiver, all over, as if the stultifying desert heat had turned to ice.
She said, Then you cried, I am Dragon! I am fire!
His tongue flicked out to catch a salty droplet falling from her cheek.
“The ocean rose, and you became fire – beautiful, gleaming white fire– and you see, Dragon, it was never the crimson sunshine of Ignis that you should have been meditating upon! It was Taramis all along. You are kin of Taramis, the white of ocean spume, the purity and cleansing power of water.”
His jaw creaked agape, and stayed that way.
Where had this come from?
With a self-conscious giggle, she said, “Dabbling in deep Dragon lore not exactly being my forte …”
“No, it makes perfect sense!” Enveloping her shoulders in his paw, he said, “You are something else, do you know that? Clearly, the tiniest brains have the greatest ideas.”
“Tiniest brains?”
“Vanishingly miniscule,” said he, illustrating with his talons. “How did the Dragon thank
