Duranix held up a hand. “I don’t believe Pa’alu meant you ill. I think he traded the nugget for some kind of spirit-token, which was meant to loose its power on you and make you love him, but there was a mix-up, and the spell discharged instead on you and Amero.”
Nianki breathed hard, forcing herself to master her anger. Her deep red color faded to normal tan. She could not escape the bounds of her compulsion, so her next question was, “Does Amero feel for me the way I feel for him?”
“He does not seem so affected. We’ll have to find Pa’alu and question him on the way the token was supposed to work.”
From towering rage, Nianki fell into despair. She wept uncontrollably at the mere thought that Amero might be suffering as she was. It was unbearable, the idea the one she loved could be in pain.
Duranix watched her cry silently, but with some sympathy. He could think of nothing to say to her.
“The old question returns,” she said, sniffling and dabbing at her nose with her sleeve. “Can you help me?”
Duranix faced her, his black, more-than-human eyes sweeping her up and down. “I cannot,” he said at last. “If the power was forced into you, it would leave a spirit wound on you I could see, and I might be able to draw it out into a likely receptacle — a crystal or metal object, but I sense nothing out of place. That’s the black subtlety of it. Every human has the capacity to love. Yours has simply been directed along an unnatural course. There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Can’t you use your power to change who I love, at least?” she asked wildly.
“I’m not a practitioner of such arts. If I tried blindly, I might harm you, or worse, even kill you.”
Nianki laughed bitterly. “Death couldn’t be worse than this.” Her countenance convulsed in deep anguish for a few seconds, then suddenly cleared. She strode to the lower door, bypassing the hoist basket, which was lying on its side. Standing in the opening, her long shirt rippling in the breeze from the waterfall, she cried, “I can do something a dragon can’t! I can cure a lovesick heart!”
She jumped.
Duranix’s tall human form crossed the distance to the opening in two bounds. Without pausing, he hurled himself after her. A heartbeat later he hit the wall of plunging water. As he fell, he flung his arms outward and expanded to his true shape.
The force of the torrent was driving him toward the lake below. Through the icy blast of falling water he spotted the warmth of Nianki’s tumbling body, already halfway to the foot of the falls. Duranix folded his wings tightly to his back and plummeted after her.
Head down, neck outstretched, nose pointed at his own imminent death, the dragon overtook Nianki and grasped her in one foreclaw. She was limp and did not resist. He flung out his wings to slow their descent, but the force of the waterfall was so great, it snapped his left wing bone where it was joined to his body.
Pain.
He hadn’t felt pain in a long time. Genta’s spear thrusts, even Vedvedsica’s spirit-blast, had been playful buffets compared to this. The last time the dragon had felt anything this excruciating was the day the avalanche had covered the nest. A whole mountain had fallen on him, and he’d lain there, entombed with his mother and siblings, gasping in the darkness as his bones were crushed, his body smashed.
He had to slow their fall. He threw his shoulders back, forcing his wings open. Bone scraped on bone in the broken wing, and the dragon roared in agony. The updraft around the churning falls lifted and slowed him just enough for him to put his three unencumbered claws down before he hit the ground. The shock of his landing was enough to bring blood to his mouth. Yet, through the red haze of pain, Duranix remembered what he held in his left foreclaw. He leaned to his right, put his claw down gently and opened it. Nianki rolled senseless to the ground. Duranix toppled over, trembled, and lay still.
The sound of Amero’s voice penetrated the roar of the water and the fog in the dragon’s head.
“Duranix! Duranix!”
“Don’t shout,” the dragon rasped, “you’re standing by my ear.”
He opened one eye. Amero and a score of nomads were clustered around. Several of the nomads knelt by Nianki’s limp body, working over her. Amero, his face white with concern, said angrily, “What were you trying to do, kill yourself?”
“Humans are so much trouble,” muttered Duranix. “Besides being stupid, they’re clumsy. That one missed your basket contraption in the dark and fell from the cave.”
Amero hurried to the circle where Nianki was being tended. He knelt beside her, pressing his hand to her throat. Her pulse beat strongly.
“She passed out,” said Targun, who was kneeling on the other side of her. “Let her rest a minute, and she’ll come back.”
Amero was about to rise when Nianki’s eyes snapped open. She half-rose and threw her arms around his neck.
“Amero! Amero! Don’t let me go!” she gasped.
Embarrassed and relieved at the same time, her brother pulled her trembling hands apart and lowered her back to the hide blanket Targun had brought for her.
“You’re all right,” he said soothingly. She turned her face away and wept. Misunderstanding the cause of her distress, Amero added, “It’s all right, truly. Duranix saved you. He’s had a hard landing, but you can’t kill a dragon so easily.”
As if to prove the truth of those words, Duranix had gotten to his feet. He clumped over to them, his broken wing dragging on the ground. His wide, serpentine head hovered over them, eyelids clicking open and shut.
Amero held his sister’s cold, wet hand. “You and I have something more in common now,” he said cheerfully. She said nothing, her face still turned away. “We’re the only two people to have leaped from the dragon’s cave and lived. I guess clumsiness runs in our blood, eh?” The gathered nomads chuckled. “What do you think, Duranix?”
The dragon glanced from Nianki to Amero and back to Nianki again. “I think humans make terrible pets,” he said.
Chapter 18
Autumn arrived. The days grew short and dark, but the darkness was not confined to the sky. Once the dragon was known to be injured, the atmosphere in the valley changed.
Nomad and villager had been getting along tolerably well, with occasional disagreements between individuals offset by frequent incidents of cooperation. Several of the younger nomads had actually begun teaching their village counterparts to ride horses. At first the elder villagers scoffed at those taking the lessons, but the young of Yala- tene knew riding could be an extremely useful sill. The lessons were marked by much raucous roughhousing, but the gibing was good-natured, and no one got hurt.
Now trouble between nomad and villager was on the rise — name-calling and theft became more frequent and escalated into shouting matches and fistfights. Riding lessons came to a halt. The once-friendly sessions had become untenable after several violent melees.
Amero and the village elders moved from one crisis to another, separating angry nomads and villagers, smoothing over confrontations, trying to resolve a growing host of simmering disputes.
“I don’t understand it,” Amero complained one evening. He was in the home of Konza the tanner. He and his host had gulped a hasty meal by the circular fireplace while waiting for the next outbreak of trouble.
“I thought things would work out better than this,” he continued, poking the fire with an aromatic cedar stick. “Our people and Nianki’s — we’re all plainsmen. We’ve learned so much from each other and can learn a lot more. So why is there so much trouble?”
“You believe too much in the goodness of people,” Konza said. The firelight etched the lines of weariness on his face with deep shadows. “These wanderers are lazy, good-for-nothing savages. What they want, they steal. What they don’t understand, they destroy.”
Amero looked up from prodding the flames. “I thought Nianki could keep them in line.”
