Read Rise of the Fire Tamer (The Wordwick Games #1) Online
Authors: Kailin Gow
“Rio, Goolrick gave me a ring, a magic ring. It lets me see what people really want. It was how I could communicate with the Shadow King.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I didn’t have a chance at first, and then I was worried that it would look odd, Goolrick giving me something like that but not the rest of you. Rio, when I touched the dragon, I knew what it wanted. Something has taken its egg, and it wants it back. I even know where the dragon thinks it is, more or less.”
Rio leant back against a tree.
“We could tell the others all this,” he suggested. Gem shook her head.
“They might not believe it. Anyway, they won’t want to risk it. We have to find that egg though. I’m convinced of it.”
To Gem’s surprise, Rio nodded. He grinned.
“What? You thought I would say no? Not after everything you’ve done so far. If you say there’s a dragon’s egg, Gem, then there’s a dragon’s egg.” Rio gestured to the forest. “If you think you can find it, we should get going.”
Rio was right about that. They couldn’t afford to waste time. Gem sensed that the dragon’s egg was important; she had been able to feel how much the dragon had cared about it. If they wanted to make use of it though, the two of them would have to get to the spot Gem had seen in the dragon’s thoughts before the creature itself did.
That was easier said than done. Gem tried to lead Rio on what she thought was the correct course down the wooded slopes, but the image she was working from had been from the point of view of a creature flying over, not one walking between the tree trunks. Even using the sun as a guide, it was hard to be certain that they were going in the right direction.
The ground grew soft. Large flowers in yellow and pink bloomed in gaps between the trees, apparently thriving in the muddy conditions. The flowers were almost bigger than her head, though some of the thorns on them looked wickedly sharp. Shadows flitted between the trees too, and Gem found herself wondering if they were reporting back to their king.
In at least one way, the muddy ground didn’t help things much. Although Gem’s dress had seen a few fights, a lot of dirt, and several near-misses from a dragon, the last thing she needed was the hem of it weighed down with half a ton of mud as she walked. At the next patch of mud, she hitched her dress up to her knees to cross it.
Rio’s flying tackle ruined that plan nicely, though with the whistle of something whipping back and forth just above them as they fell, Gem didn’t mind the sudden immersion in mud. Well, not too much. Looking round, she saw a plant creeper being reeled back to a flower like a fishing line, or like a frog’s sticky tongue after it had just missed a fly.
Wary, Gem stayed very still, and then rolled as another creeper shot out for them, missing by inches. She scrambled to her feet and Rio did the same.
“Run?” Gem suggested.
“Run,” Rio agreed.
They ran. Creepers shot around them, but never quite connected as Gem and Rio ducked and wove their way through the woods. The plants were tenacious, Gem had to give them that. Twice, she thought they were safe, only to find flowers just feet away. Keeping Rio’s hand in hers so as not to lose him, Gem ran until she couldn’t run any further.
Mostly, that was because the ground dropped away sharply in front of her, leaving Gem and Rio teetering on the edge of a small cliff disguised by the trees. Gem dared a glance down. It wasn’t more than fifty feet, but it didn’t need to be. Gem wondered how many people, fleeing the plants, had fallen to their deaths over it.
Thoughts of the plants made her turn back towards the trees. Gem could make out large shapes shuffling slowly through them, creeping along on thick roots, almost swimming through the soil. There were a lot of them. So many that Gem doubted that, even using the ruler words, Rio and her would be able to deal with them all. Even so, she resolved to try.
“
Venerable
,” Gem said, pointing at one plant. It withered and wilted with age, collapsing on itself. It seemed the flowers didn’t live very long. “
Arid
,” she tried, pointing at another. It browned and shriveled like all flowers do when left without water. “
Deleterious
,” she continued, choosing a third. It exploded in a shower of leaves. It didn’t matter. The others pressed onwards.
“Looks like I shouldn’t have brought you on this trip, Rio,” Gem said. Rio didn’t reply. Instead, he stepped in front of her, hacking at the first plant to come close, then the second. Gem moved to help.
“Just stay behind me, Gem. I won’t let them get you.”
Rio hacked at more and more of them. Gem destroyed a few more with words. Still they kept coming. Gem was starting to wonder what it would feel like to be eaten by a plant. Probably not that good, really.
The shadows fell on the plants in their hundreds. It made what they had done to Goolrick’s men earlier look gentle. Here they weren’t trying to capture, or to test. Here, they had merely found something they wanted to destroy. It took only minutes for there to be no sign of a single flower among the trees. A small, shadowy squirrel leapt onto Gem’s hand. She laughed.
“What is it?” Rio asked.
“I can see what it wants, remember? It wants us to be safe, because its king told it to look after us.”
“That doesn’t sound very funny.”
“It also wants some more of that tasty salad we found for it.”
Rio laughed then, and almost fell off the edge of the cliff doing so. Gem grabbed him, and found him suddenly close to her.
“You know I’d do anything for you, Gem,” Rio said.
“Would you?”
“Yes. You deserve to be ruler here, I see that. I thought I could be, but you’re… so much more than I could be. And I… I like you a lot. I’ll help you, whatever it takes.”
Rio kissed her then, and Gem let him. It was a good kiss, better than the one they’d had before, despite the fact that they were both covered in mud. Gem wasn’t sure if she wanted as much from Rio as he obviously wanted from her, but for now, she was just glad to taste his lips on hers. Well, except for the mud, obviously.
They broke apart, and Gem knew she should say something. She just wasn’t sure what. Looking around for inspiration, she glanced over the cliff again, and stopped.
“Rio, look!”
A nest sat near the base of the cliff, sheltered by it. It was a huge nest, the sort of thing that you could really only miss the first time when being chased by hungry plants. Gem didn’t want to think about the size of the bird that had built it. In the nest, snug in one corner, sat an egg.
“We’ve found it,” Gem said. Rio nodded.
“How do we get down to it though?”
That proved to be surprisingly easy, at least when they managed to convey what they wanted to the shadows and convince the creatures’ current leader that leaping wasn’t an option. Even if it was a squirrel, they weren’t lemmings. As easily as they’d tied together the shadows of Goolrick’s men, the shadow creatures wove together strands of darkness from the shadows of creepers and vines, forming a dark rope that seemed to be firmly attached to the shadow of an oak tree.
Gem climbed down it first, with Rio following. Close up, the nest seemed even larger, and the egg was huge. Gem suspected that she would barely be able to lift it comfortably.
A screech came from above. Gem looked up to see two huge shapes racing one another towards the nest. In the lead was a giant bird that looked like it might have swooped down on elephants the way owls did on mice. Behind it, breathing flame from each of its three heads, was the dragon. It lunged after the bird, trying to catch it, but the bird looped and dove, dodging the strike.
The bird whirled then, perhaps because it was so close to the nest. It struck at the dragon, its huge talons skittering off the other beast’s scales. A plunging thrust of the giant beak found itself met by the dragon’s jaws. The two creatures tumbled away from each other in mid air, then wheeled for another run at one another.
The great bird climbed, then swooped down at the dragon, which somehow managed to hover there in spite of its bulk. It looked to Gem like the dragon was almost waiting for the bird. That thought was substantiated a moment later when the dragon whirled in mid air, bringing its tail round in one of those whipping sweeps it had used in the cave. Attacking as it was, the bird couldn’t stop in time. It flew into the striking tail with a sickening crack, then fell limply, lifelessly, until it hit the ground with a crash that shook it.
The dragon roared its triumph, then stopped, staring down at the nest. Gem knew that it would be able to see her and Rio, knew that it would be able to see its egg. Worse, trapped in the nest as the two of them were, there was nowhere to run. As the dragon landed, its heads on a level with the bird’s nest, Gem struggled to think of a way that she and Rio could keep safe.
The dragon opened its mouth to flame. In desperation, Gem snatched up the egg, holding it between her and the dragon like a shield. The dragon hiccoughed, but didn’t flame. It looked at Gem in puzzlement. It tried to dart its heads around to the side, but Gem pressed back against the cliff wall, keeping the egg in the way.
“If you try to hurt us, I’ll drop your egg,” Gem warned. She wasn’t sure if the dragon would understand or not, but she had to try. The dragon let out a whine and shuffled back a little.
“I think it got that,” Rio said. “Try something else.”
“Maybe we could come to some sort of amicable arrangement?” Gem said to the dragon. “You know, a compromise?” She didn’t know if that would be too complex for the creature. It moved closer. This close, Gem could reach out and put a hand on its scaly skin, so she did so. It was easy to see what the dragon wanted. It wanted to protect its egg, and feed the tiny dragon that would come from it as well as itself.
“We can look after you and your baby,” Gem promised. “We can see to it that no one steals your egg again. We’ll find a way to feed you too, I promise. This ravaging the countryside has to stop, though.”
Gem felt silly, saying all that. The dragon didn’t understand her. How could it possibly understand?
With great slowness, the dragon’s head before her nodded up and down. Gem let out a laugh, then leapt nimbly over the head to land on the creature’s back, still clutching the egg.
“Come on, Rio. I think we’ve got ourselves a dragon.”
Chapter 14
T
he dragon swooped and soared, toying with the wind around it as though trying to show off for them. For his part, Rio wasn’t so much impressed as thinking about what would happen if he and Gem fell off from so far up. That was replaced by the thought that Gem wouldn’t let it happen, because she seemed so totally in control of the creature…
Gem was so busy enjoying the feeling of flight that she found it hard to keep any track of time. Had they been there minutes, hours? She had wrapped the egg in Rio’s cloak so it wouldn’t fall, and it nestled snugly against her. Eventually, they would have to come back to earth, but not yet…
Sparks ran with the others, heading for the village at the base of the castle. They had lost track of the dragon, but even so far out they could make out smoke…
Kat was starting to flag when she saw the smoke. She quickened her step. If this was real, then she wasn’t going to just leave people to be eaten by some dragon…
Goolrick saw the smoke too, but he knew what dragon smoke looked like, and this wasn’t it. There was only one other explanation. ‘Spurious!’ he yelled, stepping up the pace. ‘Spurious are attacking the village!”
Eventually
, Gem realized that they would need to head for the village, if only to let Goolrick and the others know what they had managed to do.
“Take us to the village,” she called out, struggling to be heard above the rush of air as the dragon flew. Apparently, dragons had sharp hearing, or maybe it was having three sets of ears to hear with, because the creature wheeled and flew towards the distant shape of the castle. It ate up the miles with powerful strokes of its leathery wings, and Gem idly wondered if the world might be better if everyone could travel by dragon. No, she decided, as one of the dragon’s heads snapped out to eat half of a passing flock of pigeons, probably not.
Even with occasional digressions though the flight didn’t take long. The castle changed from a dot on the horizon to the huge, forbidding structure it actually was. Beneath it, Anachronia’s central village smoldered. From their perch high above, Gem could just about make out two antlike mobs closing on one another.
“It looks like a war,” Rio said from his spot behind her on the dragon’s back. Gem nodded.
“Spurious must have attacked. We have to stop this, Rio.”
“How?”
Gem looked down at the people on the ground, then turned back to the dragon. One of the heads was turned back to her, clearly waiting for instructions.
“Can you take us lower?” Gem asked.
There was no answering nod from the dragon, but the world rushed up towards them with a speed that made Gem wish she had specified how
quickly
the dragon should take them lower. It felt like being on a roller coaster, only without quite so many things to hold them in place.
As uncomfortable as the feeling was, it still had to be better than how things would seem on the ground as the dragon circled so much closer. Gem could imagine how it would feel, looking up, knowing that the dragon was coming. Sure enough, looking down, she could see that some of the people below were already running.
Not all of them were, though. The figures below were a motley bunch, and now that Gem was closer she could see the ogres among them, and the wolves. She could see the bodies where people had fallen in the fighting, too. Nobody was fighting now though, and a couple of people had even stopped on the verge of delivering huge blows, looking very much like the music had just paused in a particularly violent game of musical statues.
Everybody was looking up. The men of Perfidious were looking up. The men whom Gem assumed were from Spurious were looking up. The ogres were looking up, squinting short-sightedly in the sun. Even the wolves were looking up, and howling at the sight of the great lizard above them.
Gem tried to pick out the figures of the others in the suddenly paused melee. Sparks and Goolrick were easy to spot, at the heart of the fighting. Kat was off at one edge, and appeared to be making the most of the distraction to inch out of reach of an ogre’s axe while the creature wasn’t looking. Jack seemed to have taken his bow to a safe perch on one of the buildings’ roofs, from where he could shoot down at the soldiers.
Gem picked out another figure, dressed in what seemed to be layer after layer of gray clothes. Bizarrely, that wasn’t what made him stand out. What did
that
was the fact that he was staring up through binoculars; ones that Gem recognized from Jack’s backpack. Even as Gem watched, he took the binoculars from his eyes and yelled, loud enough that, in the silence where the sounds of battle had been, even Gem could hear him.
“The dragon has riders! A girl with hair of gold and a dark haired boy! It is a sign! A sign, I tell you! The rulers! The rulers have come back!”
Even from so far above, Gem could hear the excitement in his voice. It was echoed in a general murmur of “a sign” from the Spurious men, occasionally echoed by “what’s a sign?” from one of the ogres. A little shuffling ripple seemed to run through the men on the Spurious side then. It was a little fidgeting wave of motion as men half-glanced at their swords and then sheathed them or put them behind their backs as if to say, “Fight? What fight? We weren’t having a fight, honest.”
The general effect on the Perfidious side wasn’t perhaps as noticeable, but their arrival certainly had an effect on Goolrick. He looked up, then motioned for his men to pull back. Along with Sparks, Kat and Jack, they headed for the castle in a sort of mass backing away, as though afraid of what the Spurious soldiers might do if they turned their backs even for a moment.
“We should meet them in the castle,” Rio suggested, and Gem nodded, but the dragon seemed to have already understood the idea. A few beats of its wings took it up over the castle’s walls before it spread them, using them almost like a parachute as it came in to land in the space beyond with a bump. The others were already running to meet them as Gem and Rio slid down from the dragon’s back. They gave the dragon wary looks, but seemed delighted to see the two of them.
“You did it,” Sparks said. “You actually managed to tame the dragon.”
“Doesn’t that mean you’re the rulers of this place?” Kat put in. If there was a jealous note there, it was a transient one. Jack shook his head.
“Only… only one of them can be ruler. I’m fairly s-sure that’s what Mr. Word said.”
“But which one?” Goolrick asked it, though Gem noticed that he gave the dragon’s egg she held wrapped up in Rio’s cloak a glance. “I see that you found a way to defeat the beast, dear Gem. And with your brains instead of simple strength. Exemplary, truly exemplary.”
Gem shook her head.
“I couldn’t have done it by myself. Rio helped. So did the shadow creatures in the forest. If I’d been on my own, I would never have managed it.”
To Gem, Goolrick didn’t seem entirely happy about that, but he hid it well. He stepped forward, throwing an arm each around her shoulders and Rio’s.
“Then it is not yet certain which of you should be the ruler.”
He led the two of them up a flight of stone steps to the battlements, from where they could look down on the ground outside the gate. A crowd had gathered, containing both Spurious and Perfidious men, who jostled and pushed for a better view. Frankly Gem was just glad that no one had gone back to fighting once the shock of seeing her and Rio on the dragon had worn off. Goolrick stood between them on the gatehouse walls, spreading his hands like some great orator making it clear he was about to make a speech. Gem kept hold of the dragon’s egg and waited to hear what he would say.
“My friends, my occasional enemies, behold! The dragon is tamed!”
“But which one of them did it?” a voice from the crowd demanded. Others joined it. “Yeah. Which one of them is the Fire Tamer, the one who tamed the Dragon?”
“Who did it?”
“Why have we stopped fighting? I was enjoying it.”
The last comment was from one of the ogres, who took a half-hearted swing at a section of wall on the off chance that it would fight back. Everyone ignored him. Mostly, they were too busy staring. For a moment, Gem thought they were simply staring at her and Rio, but then it occurred to her that they were staring somewhere above her. She looked back.
The dragon had reared up, as it had done in the cave, its three heads dancing back and forth above the level of the walls. It seemed to pause, as though making very sure that every eye was on it, then opened its three mouths at once to let out a vertical jet of flame that reached up to the clouds in a single blue-white column of heat.
From the corner of her eye, Gem saw Rio take a step back, pressing against the stone of the crenulations. Even Goolrick, perhaps remembering what that flame had done in the cave, edged away from the dragon. For her part, Gem just cradled the creature’s egg to her carefully. She knew the dragon wouldn’t hurt her. Not now. Not with what she could do for it and its child.
Slowly, and surprisingly gracefully, the central head lowered itself to Gem’s level. The other two kept a stern eye on the watching crowd as though daring them to look away. Nobody did. Well, nobody except the ogre who’d tried attacking the wall, and that was mostly because he’d resorted to fighting himself in the absence of anyone else, and had done so with sufficient vigor to knock himself unconscious.
Gem didn’t notice it. She was too busy staring into those huge, reptilian eyes, bigger than her head. The pupils were mere slits, like a snake’s. How much did it understand? How clever was it? Gem didn’t know for sure. It had understood her enough to bargain, and had understood her instructions. Could it really understand enough of what was going on to be doing this though?
Well, it was doing it, so the answer to that was obviously yes.
The dragon nudged at Gem with its head the way a kitten might, except that no kitten could nudge hard enough to leave Gem bracing herself against the wall.
“What do you want?” she said softly, then smiled. There was an easy way to find out. Pressing Goolrick’s ring to the scales brought images of Gem climbing onto the dragon’s back. Of them giving the crowd a sight to remember before flying off.
“You want to take me somewhere?”
In answer, the dragon nudged her again. Gem took the hint, sliding down the offered neck to a spot on the dragon’s back. Its wings spread out with a snap of leather.
“Gem?” Sparks demanded. “What are you doing?”
“Just going for a quick flight. Nothing to worry about.”
Gem might have said more, but the dragon chose that moment to leap into flight, its wings forcing it upwards. Below her, Gem could see the crowd still staring. They wouldn’t be in any doubt
now
about which of them had tamed the dragon. The dragon let out a sound that might have been a snort of satisfaction, along with another burst of flame above the heads of the watching group.
“Less of that,” Gem ordered. “You’ll scare them.”
The dragon let out another, not altogether happy sound, but it didn’t flame again. Instead, it circled slowly, obviously wanting to give those watching plenty of time to see what was happening. Finally, it banked away, and Gem did her best to cling onto both it and the egg as it picked out a new course along the edge of the trees.
“So,” Gem said conversationally, “where are you taking me?”
Gem didn’t expect a reply, obviously, and touching the dragon with Goolrick’s ring wasn’t much help. It gave her a location, but only in the same general way as she had seen the way to the bird’s nest before. It was only when they got closer that Gem understood what she was seeing. The dragon was flying steadily towards a village of gray stone houses and turf roofs, getting lower as it got closer.
There were obviously some people it wanted Gem to meet.
Sparks’
heart had been in his mouth when Rio and Gem had arrived together, but then, when it had become clear which of them the dragon had chosen, he’d dared to relax. Now though, Gem had gone off with it, and he just had to hope that she was safe…
Rio silently cursed himself for stepping back, but he knew that it didn’t make much difference. He had clung to the dragon for fear of falling, but Gem, she had ridden it as surely as if it had been a horse. He just hoped that she was riding it somewhere safe now…
Kat edged closer as Rio watched the dragon leave. Tentatively, she put a comforting arm around his waist…
Jack found himself thinking about dragons. In legend, they were supposed to be clever, so would this one be clever enough to have a plan of its own?
Goolrick watched the flight of the dragon with pure admiration. So much power, controlled so easily…