Dragonfriend (15 page)

Hallon dropped Lia as though he had clutched a red-hot boulder. Rallon, racing toward his twin, suddenly found a petite girl crumpled at his feet and measured his considerable length over her bowed back, bowling into the group of monks, while the portly one hopped from one foot to the other, screeching like a demented windroc.

Cries surrounded Lia, “Seize her!” “It’s a girl–I swear, that has to be a girl, not a dragonet.” “Thief!” “Unhand my treasures, filth!” “What’s all the excitement about, I ask you?”

Lia made a desperate grab for a toppling plinth, only to have her knuckles rapped by an elderly monk’s cane. The ancient treasure fell and shattered, scattering pieces of jade everywhere. Rallon or Hallon, it hardly mattered which, leaped on her back and set about trussing her like a ralti sheep bound for market. Despite the fact that she did not intend to fight back, Hualiama found him discouragingly excellent at his job. In seconds, he had pinned her arms and secured her wrists between her shoulder blades, finishing off his handiwork with a loop around her neck and a viciously tight knot.

Realising exactly which strip of cloth the young monk had used to tie her up, Hualiama blushed furiously. Mercy! Look somewhere else, anywhere else–ruddy gorgeous monk! One image burned in her mind forever …

“Calm yourself, Master Ja’alkon,” said one of the old ones to the rotund monk, whose face had by now assumed an unhealthy hue.

“Calm myself?” he screamed, swinging his foot wildly at Lia’s neck, only to miss and clatter the man on her back right on the point of the chin. He toppled like a felled tree. “This is sacrilege! Sedition! A riot! Brothers, it is beyond belief–we have a
girl
on our Island! The Black Dragon himself bellows his outrage. Wretched cur! Slime-dripping spawn of the Cloudlands! You shall be beaten–”

A new, calm voice cut through the hubbub. “Enough.”

S
ilence Descended UPON
the squabbling monks as though the new arrival had tossed a Dragon into their midst. An enormously tall, rail-thin monk peered down at Lia, his hands folded into the sleeves of his robes, his ascetic face serene. What betrayed his power were the blue eyes, flashing at Lia like twin blades.

“This pustulent offspring of a windroc …”

The tall monk said, “Master Ja’alkon, please. Try to muster your dignity.”

Ja’alkon folded his arms with an audible sigh. “Master Jo’el, I am merely moved with righteous indignation that this female
should appear from nowhere, invade our sanctuary, and–how did you get here, you miniature brigand?”

“Real, lift your brother off her,” directed the tall monk. “Girl, stand up, and–Islands’ sakes! What scanty attire is this? Quick, take my robe.”

Hualiama ducked her head in embarrassment. The monk thrust a robe over her head, which puddled around her ankles in a vivid demonstration of the difference between their respective heights. She wanted to protest about how uncomfortable her trussed hands were, but then it struck her that she knew the tall monk, who had an exceedingly long face with a fantastic beak of a nose that seemed perfect for staring down at diminutive girls and crushing them with a single look.

She essayed a bow curtailed by the throttling strip of loincloth.

“Master Jo’el, I trust you’ve had no more trouble with your Dragonship?”

“Well,” said the Master, eyebrows crawling toward the swirling blue tattoos adorning his pate. His lips seemed to quiver at their corners before he compressed them into a thin line. “Well,” he began again, a stutter-step as he took stock of his captive. “This is most unexpected.”

Ja’alkon made a triumphant crowing noise. “See?”

The blue eyes fixed Lia with unnerving intensity. “Who are you for, girl? Tell me, who are you for?”

“Er …”

“Which King?”

“My father, of course.”

In the stunned silence, Master Ja’alkon could be heard to splutter, “No, she isn’t. No. Is she? No. Couldn’t be.”

Master Jo’el folded his stick-thin arms across his chest. “Masters, I know this girl. She stopped to help me repair my Dragonship on Fa’akkior Island, last year after storm season, as I recall. She jury-rigged my broken sails and patched up a broken stove-pipe. Masters, I have great pleasure in presenting to you the daughter of our one true King, the Princess Hualiama of Fra’anior.”

“That pilfering scoundrel is a Princess?”

To Lia’s astonishment, Master Jo’el’s smile only broadened, crinkling the area around his eyes like old parchment. “And your rightful ruler in our King’s absence, Master Ja’alkon.”

She had the impression that Master Jo’el very much enjoyed making that statement, especially the emphasis he placed on the words ‘rightful ruler’. Perhaps now was not the moment to protest that she was a worthless royal ward and not a true Princess at all.

One should never steal a Dragon’s thunder.

Ja’alkon seemed in danger of choking as Lia turned a bright, albeit slightly brittle smile on him. “The Master is right. I should not have trespassed. I am truly sorry to have caused you such deep distress, Master Ja’alkon. Will you forgive me?”

The Master wrung his podgy hands as he laboured to formulate a polite response.

Jo’el put in dryly, “Well is it said that a woman’s smile is her greatest weapon.” His gaze paused on Rallon for a second as he spoke, causing the young monk to colour deeply.

A flutter of wings interrupted them. Flicker zipped through the open doorway and landed on Lia’s shoulder with a deft manoeuvre. “I leave you alone for one minute, Lia,” he hissed, in a whisper clearly pitched to carry to every ear present. “Could you not stay out of trouble for one whole minute?”

“And this?” squeaked another of the Masters.

“I shall take charge of this dumb beast, Master Ra’oon,” said Ja’alkon.

“Dumb beast?” spluttered Flicker. “I’ll give you a dumb beast, you great waddling ralti sheep.”

Lia clucked at him, “Shut the monkey-chatter, beast.”

Drawing himself up to his full two feet of height, the dragonet announced, “I am Flicker, and I saved this ungrateful imp’s life. Twice. But you are wise to keep her tied up. Indeed, she’s such a troublemaker, I must counsel you to lock her in your deepest dungeon, at once.”

“Oh?” said Master Jo’el.

“By the First Egg, indeed,” agreed the dragonet, warming to his task. “You might even consider feeding her to the Great Dragon.”

The Master frowned, “On a dragonet’s word?”

Flicker appeared unfazed. “Unless you want to help her defeat Ra’aba. You see, that traitor tried to murder my Lia, but I rescued her–indeed, at great personal sacrifice.” At the sound of Lia clearing her throat, Flicker hurried on, “She has been living on Ha’athior Island ever since, with me. I have tried to teach her the basics of civilised behaviour, truly, I have. But I despair.”

Lia struggled to contain her laugher. Oh, Flicker! He had learned entirely too much Island Standard for her liking.

Master Jo’el, however, seemed to have the measure of the dragonet. Stroking his beard, he said, “This is wise counsel, my fellow-Masters. Clearly, this wild Princess is in need of a firm hand of instruction–”

“We are not taking her in!” announced Master Ja’alkon.

From his great height, Jo’el quirked a wire-thin eyebrow at the source of the interruption. “You can’t find her a private chamber in the apprentice quarters, Master?”

“But … but she’s already created utter chaos and mayhem,” spluttered the Master, seemingly gripped by a vision of the end of the Island-World, with stars hurtling to their deaths in the Cloudlands and volcanoes blasting the Islands to smithereens. “What of our dignity? What of these young, impressionable monks?
She
–” he collected himself with a supreme effort “–she’s a
girl
.”

Finally, Master Jo’el’s smile lit up his face. “Then I wish for us all the discovery of a little joyous indignity.”

* * * *

Hualiama smacked down on the hard-packed sand with a grunt. She rolled, dodging Hal’s follow-up blow, leaped to her feet, and promptly had her footing scythed out from beneath her by his five-foot ironwood staff. Lia ate sand this time.

Get up. Never give in. She swung her staff at the monk. Block, block, the ironwood rods clacked together with sharp reports–yelp, as he crushed her already broken fingers. Attack! For perhaps fifteen seconds, Lia had the measure of Hallon, despite that he stood over a foot taller than her, and was twice as wide and three times as strong. He defended robustly, forcing her to retreat, to shift her attack as she sought a way through the blurred reaches of his rock-solid defence. From the corner of her eye, Hualiama caught sight of Master Jo’el and his fellow-Masters filing into the training arena to watch the royal ward having the stuffing belted out of her for at least the five hundredth time in the course of the three weeks she had been training at the monastery. She groaned. That millisecond’s distraction allowed Hallon the opening he hardly needed, given the beating he was busy handing her. Again.

Lia landed flat on her back. “Bloody ralti–”

His staff bore down. “Yield,” snarled the monk, his face barely an inch from hers. His weight crushed her neck against the arena floor.

“Submit?” called Ga’ando, the Master of Weapons.

Lia felt her face turn purple as the shaft cut off her air supply. On an impulse, she kissed the handsomely cleft point of Hal’s chin. He gasped in surprise; she swung her legs up, wrapped them around his neck, and tried to apply a stranglehold she had learned that week. Hal toppled to the sand, losing his grip on the staff.

Two seconds later, the monk kicked her off as though he intended to launch her back over to Ha’athior Island. Lia somersaulted in the air, fluffed her landing, and landed with a jolt on her tailbone instead. Pain shot up her spine. Almost elegant. The story of her life. Master Jo’el could have his joyous indignity–Islands full of indignity–because all of it belonged to hopeless Hualiama.

“Enough,” said Master Jo’el. “Lia, how are you?”

“Fine!”

Lia limped over to her staff, and bent with clenched teeth to pick it up. There was no part of her body which did not ache. She was more bruise than clear skin. Only a complete null-brain would to try to keep up with warrior monks who had trained like this, sixteen hours a day, since their boyhood. The difference between their skills and those of the Palace guard was the difference between a dragonet and a fully-grown Dragon. Lia was efficient and creative in combat, but that simply did not shave the proverbial Dragon’s beard when it came to fighting warriors of this calibre.

A hundred pairs of eyes watched her hobble back across the arena. Two, in particular, disturbed her. One set belonged to an apprentice called Ja’al, whose dark blue eyes followed her every move with unnerving intensity. Handsome but aloof, she thought, wishing he might unbend just once to offer her a welcoming smile, rather than that constant, withering appraisal. Next to Ja’al, his older brother Hua’gon watched with brooding mien. Hua’gon was the one who had broken two fingers on her right hand the previous week.

A polite clearing of a throat drew her attention.

Forming his long fingers into a cone reminiscent of the volcano he lived on top of, Master Jo’el said, “Hualiama of Fra’anior, you’ve completed three weeks’ probation. Masters, your assessments. Weapons?”

Lia gazed up at the ranks of Masters gathered on the stone steps above the circular training arena, trying not to disclose how her heart lurched toward her ankles, and from there leached away into the sand.

“She fights with great heart,” said Master Ga’ando, in his characteristic ruined whisper. A windroc had once tried to rip out his throat. Ga’ando, famously, had won that encounter by shoving his fist down the bird’s throat to strangle it. “Lia has tried as hard as any prospective apprentice I have ever trained. But I regret to conclude that, despite demonstrating basic capability, she seems to lack a natural aptitude for weapons–any weapons at all.”

Lia winced. Mercy. Don’t hold back, Master Ga’ando!

“Your tutors, Master Ha’aggara?”

The bookish young monk, whom the apprentices called ‘Aggers’, said, “Lia is a fine and dedicated student of literature, and the sciences, histories and Humanities, Master Jo’el. But she is deplorably fond of joking about serious matters. That aside, she corrected Tutor Ga’al’s knowledge of Dragonship aerodynamics. She’s a fine engineer.”

“I see,” said Jo’el, in a tone that made Lia shuffle her feet. If only she had not cracked a joke about Ga’al’s gaffe afterward. That had earned her a stern reprimand and a night spent cleaning the practice arena until not a grain of sand was out of place.

“Master Ra’oon?”

The elderly Master managed a surprisingly nimble and florid bow. “As you know, Master Jo’el, the prospective apprentice sings like a purple-crested warbler, and plays a decent hand on the great-harp and the Jeradian pan-flute. Lia is a fine musician.”

“Master To’ibbik?”

The harsh Master of Arcane Arts sniffed loudly, as he was wont to do, in Lia’s general direction. “It is too early to tell if the girl has any ability in the mystical arts. But I doubt it.”

“Master Ja’alkon, your behavioural assessment?”

“Disruptive, Master Jo’el, as we expected.” Hualiama hung her head. Trust Ja’alkon to put it that way! “She behaves with the propriety one would expect of a member of the royal household, but the regrettable fact that she is a girl has the boys in uproar–we could cover her in a sack and they’d still swoon left and right to be the one to fall into her shadow. However, she is more motivated than any apprentice I have ever worked with. If she could master armed combat, the traitor Ra’aba would find he had a truly formidable enemy.”

Lia’s jaw sagged. She had concluded Ja’alkon hated her. Had his hatred mellowed into violent dislike?

“The Master of Secrets?”

Master Yiiba, the only non-Fra’aniorian among the Masters, inclined his dark, habitually searing gaze toward Hualiama. “The student displays a notable aptitude for code-breaking, lock-picking, and subterfuge,” he said, so mournfully that Lia wondered once again if teaching her caused him unspecified but excruciating pain. “She excels at espionage, is cunning and resourceful, adequate at disguise, and would make an excellent sneak-thief.”