Sometime before dawn, we woke and dressed. I wore my spidersilk skirt, a matching tunic, the cloak of the Black Unicorn, and sturdy granny boots. As I slid the horn into my side pocket, relieved that it still had power in it, I wondered what would work against a dragon—which element? White dragons used mist and snow and ice . . . but they also breathed fire. Would wind or earth work best? They flew, so they were adept in the air. But earth . . . earth might actually do some harm.
Breakfast was a silent affair, with Delilah serving fried-egg sandwiches, and Trillian silently fuming. He wanted to come with us, but he knew that we needed him there to protect the others.
Iris had changed clothes, too—she was in her priestess robes, and her hair was done up in a wrap of braids around her head. She carried her wand of Aqualine crystal with her, and as I sat playing with my food, she slipped over to my side.
“Don’t fret. We’ll take care of him.” She lightly touched the collar around my neck. “Something feels different about this.”
I nodded. “I can’t lose it just yet, but the Moon Mother came to me last night, and some of its power has been stripped away. I can’t tell you quite why, but I feel stronger. Ready to face him.” Inside, I was a quivering ball of fear-jelly, but I tried to own the fear and let it go.
Iris smoothed my hair back and braided it. “No sense giving him any advantage,” she said. “I think you’re learning a hard lesson, one that you’ve never been able to accept. You’re learning that you can’t always be the rock, you can’t always be the one who makes things better.”
“I’m not in control of this situation. Only of my reaction to it?” I smiled at her, drinking in her winning smile and brilliant blue gaze. Iris had far more common sense than most people I knew, but she wasn’t soft. She was the epitome of tough love—and she had that rare gift of making you love her for scolding you.
“Ah yes . . . then you are learning.” She stood back, eyeing my hair. “There, done for now. Finish your sandwich and we’ll go.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled, taking another bite. I shoved the last bit of sandwich into my mouth and drank down a huge glass of milk.
Delilah dusted her hands on her jeans. “I can’t believe we’re going to fight a dragon. Smoky, Shade, I just hope that you guys can take care of him, because I’m damned if I know what to do.”
Shade jerked his chin at her, smiling. “You and your sisters need to have higher opinions of yourselves. Come now. Let’s be off and get this done so we can attend to other business.”
His almost laissez-faire attitude went a long way into helping me calm down. Smoky said little, merely pulled me onto his lap and wrapped a gentle arm around my waist. I leaned into him, forehead against forehead, and kissed him lightly.
“We can do this, my husband.”
“We can, my wife.” His voice was calm, but his eyes were flashing with lightning and I knew he would not rest until Hyto was lying in a million little pieces strung out over the forest. Sometimes he loved me so much—they all did—that it scared me. I never wanted to endanger that love, but I was so far from perfect that I wondered if I was worthy of their devotion. Just then Trillian leaned in over my other shoulder and kissed me. I walked over to Morio for another kiss. Finally we were ready, and—with one last glance at the barrow—we headed out to meet Hyto.
The path leading to our designated meeting place was winding and steep. Smoky insisted on lifting me over every tree and boulder—to save my strength, he said—and Shade helped Iris. Delilah was able to clamber over the trees without a problem; she was tall enough and strong enough.
“You made Trillian and Roz stay home because they are more vulnerable to Hyto, didn’t you? Vanzir, too?” Delilah caught up to me, blowing on her hands. The early-morning air was damp and moist, filled with the taste of snow.
I nodded. “Yes, but that’s not the only reason. We really do need someone to watch over Maggie and the others. What if Hyto breaks through us? Smoky’s got it set up that if he falls, a warning will go off in the barrow. That will give them enough time to run.”
“I didn’t know that,” Delilah said, suddenly grim. “This is really it, isn’t it? We’re fighting a dragon?”
None of us had ever been on the receiving end of a dragon’s fury except Roz—once when he pinched my butt in front of Smoky—and me, at the mercy of Hyto. I hated to think about what waited in store for us when the battle was to the death.
“I didn’t know it, either, but he told me shortly before we left the barrow. He also told Trillian, so they know what’s going down. Menolly—she’s safe enough, we figure, tucked away in the lower levels. I doubt Hyto would go to much bother trying to find her. But the others . . .”
As we crossed a clearing, a deer came out of the undergrowth, standing near entwined buses of huckleberry and bracken. She stared at us, not moving but poised to run, and I gazed into her eyes as we passed by. She couldn’t control what we were doing, but her reaction was one of caution, wariness. I raised a hand, slowly, greeting her as we passed by.
The snow grew thicker, heavy and wet, as the grade of the path increased. I tried to tune in to the land here—if I was going to use the Earth Elemental to counter Hyto, it might help if I could make a connection with the land. I’d have to start paying more attention to my surroundings once I was part of Aeval’s Court, so I might as well do it now.
Suddenly, I realized I was thinking of the future as if there really was one. The thought
We might actually have a chance . . .
ran through my head, and I wondered where it had come from.
As we continued, I began to have an odd feeling we were being followed. I glanced behind us but could see nothing. When I mentioned it to Smoky, he listened, then shook his head. The hush of snow falling on snow muted sounds, and the world took on the same surreal white glow that the Northlands had held.
“I can hardly wait for spring,” I muttered under my breath. “I’ve had enough snow to last me a lifetime.”
“You and me both,” Iris said, now riding along on Smoky’s shoulders. “I am dreaming of planting flowers and vegetables. Last night, a pansy chased me down the path in my dreams, threatening me if I didn’t make it stop snowing.”
The sudden break in mood made me laugh. Even though I was trying to keep quiet, my voice rang out down the slope behind us, and I bent over, stifling myself. I managed to quickly sober up, but it took everything I had not to giggle.
Smoky and Shade said nothing, but Delilah gave me a sideways look that told me she was either very annoyed or very much in agreement with me.
We came to a level area on the slope, before the grade of the hill started up in earnest. Another half-hour’s hike, it looked like, before we reached the rendezvous point. The treeline was still dense. We weren’t even into the real foothills of the Cascades yet, though it wasn’t that hard to get an up-close-and-personal view of Mount Rainier from the road. But here the vegetation was thick, the snow deep, and the going problematic.
“At least he doesn’t want to meet us up on the top of the glaciers. I don’t fancy a climb up Mount Rainier to fight a dragon.” Even as the words left my lips, there was a noise to the right and a bolt of lightning came shooting out at us. It missed Delilah and me but caught Shade on the arm. He shouted and dodged to the right as the glaring fork disappeared.
“Crap! Is that Hyto?” I turned, quickly seeking out any form that might tell us he was in the area. But the area from where the attack had come was thick with fern and bracken, covered in large drifts of snow. A hole had melted through it—the spell had to have come from there, but it was low to the ground and somehow I didn’t think that Hyto could keep himself hidden that well. He was too arrogant; he’d want us to know it was him.
Shade motioned for us to stay on the path and hurried over to the area, kicking the plants askew. “Nobody here. But there was, and they wore . . . some form of sandal, would be my guess.”
“Sandals? Hyto doesn’t wear sandals.” I frowned. “He wears boots and they’re damned hard and heavy. I know, my ribs show the damage.” Smoky let out a low bark and I turned to him. “Keep hold of yourself, my love. Not once while I was there did he wear anything but those damned boots.”
“Should we follow the tracks?” Delilah asked.
Shade gazed at the direction in which they’d gone. “I don’t know if that will do us any good. That was powerful magic. Anyone who can command a strong lightning bolt . . .”
“My father cannot.” Smoky set Iris on the ground and she shook her self out. “He can control mist and fog and snow, better than I can, but he can’t control the lightning. Unless he was using a scroll, there’s no way he could have cast a spell like that.”
“Then who . . .” I paused. “I know who.” And I did—as sure as I knew my name. “Asheré. The snow monkey—he’s a rogue monk from the Northlands. Trust me, it’s got to be him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Makes sense to me.” I took a deep breath and looked around, expecting to see him at every turn, but there was simply nothing there. “He’s playing cat and mouse with us. That has to be it. Keep your eyes open—he’ll probably try to dishearten us before we ever come into sight of Hyto. Reason tells me that much. Hyto likes to torture his toys. Anything that can demoralize us, he’ll do.”
“His ego won’t allow the snow monkey to make the kill, however.” Smoky let out a long breath. “My father is the epitome of arrogance.”
“Yeah, I know that too well.” I chewed on my bottom lip. “When he was beating me, he was screaming that I was not his equal. He blames me for setting you against him, and consequently for getting him thrown out of the Dragon Reaches.”
“He would have been thrown out eventually, regardless of what I did or did not do. My mother was reaching the end of her patience. When I went to help her not long ago, she told me that she’d already decided to deny him in Council, and that his behavior toward me—and you—was just the final straw.” Scowling, he shook his head. “Hyto was never a good husband, but she married him because of civil obligation.”
I had never heard Smoky talk so much about his family. Most of what I knew about them came from Iris’s knowledge of dragons. “You mean it was a marriage of convenience?”
He picked up Iris again and settled her on his shoulder, holding her tight with his hair. I smiled, watching how carefully he made sure she was comfortable. We took off again, up the slope.
“Not exactly. My grandfather—Relae, my mother’s father—had promised his friend Layr, Hyto’s father, that he would grant a marriage between one of his daughters and Layr’s son. Hyto was the ninth son of a ninth son but had not been able to find a wife. At the time, my grandfather didn’t know that Hyto was unbalanced.”
“You mean, even as a youth he was deranged?”
“I think so, yes. Mother says the signs were there, but . . . she accepted her father’s request and married down in class. It did not affect her status, being a silver dragon, and she loved her father very much and wanted to honor his request. By the time they figured out Hyto was disturbed, Mother had already had several children. She decided to wait, hoping things would get better. Denying a partner in the Dragon Reaches has long-reaching consequences, if you can prove they’ve behaved badly. Hyto would have been shunned.”
Another thought cropped up—one I’d been wondering about for awhile. “Smoky, when we first . . . when I first came to your barrow, you told me
you
were the ninth son of a ninth son. But not long ago, you told me you were the eldest son?” Might as well get things out in the open. I decided that from here out, if we survived, it would behoove me to learn as much as I could about my husbands’ families and cultures.
Smoky shuddered. One strand of his hair whipped out, striking a tree as we passed. I shrank back, remembering Hyto’s attacks.
“It is complicated. For one thing, mortality rates among dragonets are extremely high. Not many live to adulthood, which is why dragons have such large family records but such small actual families. I was the ninth son to hatch—”
“
Hatch?
You were . . . you came out of an
egg
?” I stared at him now, wondering just what else I was clueless about. Smoky’s life was becoming stranger to me as the minutes wore on.
He broke into a little smirk. “What? I’m a dragon. If we were to have a child—and I do believe that is possible—it would be a live birth because you are not of dragon heritage, but . . . Shade—he was hatched. His mother was dragon.”
Shade cleared his throat but merely nodded. Delilah stared at him, then at me. I shrugged. So our lovers had crept out of eggs. So had we; the eggs had just stayed inside our mother and turned into us.
“Anyway, there were fifteen eggs in the first batch of eggs my mother gave birth to. All hatched. Nine boys, six girls. I was the ninth son. We all lived past the first year, so we were all counted as actual children and listed in the Hall of Records. Shortly thereafter, the weaker ones began to die. Out of that first clutch, three sons and two daughters survived.”
“So you were the ninth son on record, even though at that point there were only two brothers older than you?”
He nodded. “And one older sister. Dragons typically have two to three clutches. Mother had two. Out of her second clutch, only one son and two daughters survived to be entered into the records. Only a total of ten sons and eight daughters made it to their first year. And out of the ten sons, only three of us made it to puberty. The rest died. Four of the girls made it. By the time I left home, Hyto had engineered the death of my two older brothers. My eldest sister had died in a fall from the dreyerie. So I am now the eldest. I have one sister from my clutch still alive—younger than me. The children from the second clutch are alive as well, but if Hyto had stayed around much longer, I guarantee they wouldn’t be. My clutch sister married and left, out of his reach.”