Dragons to Keep

By Katherine A Smith

“The Maho are holding them back.. Come on, Leigh, we have to go!”

Sniper waited by the door while Leigh gathered the last of his materials into two big bags. He slung one at Sniper, who caught it.

“I know. Let’s go.”

Wings furled tight to his back, Leigh dashed out, with Sniper only a step behind him. Ravenbeck was under attack—again. Th is time, it was the Lady. Sniper and Leigh ran at full speed from the new temple, partly rebuilt since the attack of the king’s bandits over a year ago. Sniper chanced a look over his shoulder. There were about a dozen dragons in the air over the town: the Lady’s dragons. Sniper didn’t think any of them were dragans—the monstrous new combination human-dragon creatures the Lady had started making—but he didn’t have time to take a close look.

There were cliff dragons about, too: two of them, but they weren’t in the air. The two cliff dragons that had ferried Sniper and Leigh to Ravenbeck to pick up their last load of archives were both skilled Maho, but no one wanted the Lady to know where the cliff dragons were, so they were hiding in the trees and fighting from there, with their dragonic magic only, using techniques that the Wostians above hopefully wouldn’t suspect to be some kind of magic. Whatever they were doing, the airborne dragons didn’t seem to be able, or want, to land, giving Sniper and Leigh time to run for the trees.

The residents of Ravenbeck waved them on as they passed. The Ravenbeckians weren’t putting up a fight, it seemed, and Sniper couldn’t blame them: no more than they could blame him and Leigh for running instead of helping them fight. The population of Ravenbeck was still small, and certainly without the means to defend against airborne dragonic attack. The Lady’s grip was descending all over Byrd. Fighting and dying here would do them no good, and they knew it.

The Lady was conquering, but not destroying. The worst the Ravenbeckians would have to endure would be feeding any dragons that remained in residence and having their children harvested for the Dragon Chamber—but Ravenbeck had enjoyed advance warning of that. Any families with only five sons had traded children with other relatives, a sort of mutual fostering, so no family would appear to have fi ve boys. As for fi rstborn daughters, Ravenbeck’s records of families histories, kept in the temple, had burned along with it during the bandit attack two years ago. Unless anyone outright admitted it, the Lady’s forces would never know which children to take.

Sniper and Leigh made it to the trees and vanished under them. Leigh was panting hard, not being used to such intense running—he was, after all, only a temple priest, even if he was winged—but Sniper caught his breath easily.

“Sniper, hold up a moment,” Leigh begged.

They didn’t have much time to rest. After a brief pause, they pushed on, following a game trail to where their dragon allies would meet them. When they reached the spot, at a large rock that made a bit of a break in the canopy, the two dragons were waiting with twitching tails.

“Slow humans, aye,” Synrapchick scoff ed.

“Sorry, Chickie,” Sniper replied easily, earning him a scowl from the sleek, flame-red female, who hated that nickname.

He couldn’t help but grin a little. Bantering with Synrapchick made him happy. Although she was over a hundred years old, she was still quite young for a dragon, and most of the time she acted like a teenager. Sniper counted her as a friend and treated her like an equal, even when it rankled her. Actually, he kind of liked it when it rankled her.

“Will the village be all right?” the other dragon, a larger and older light blue male, asked. “Should we send reinforcements to drive the Lady’s forces off ?”

“We knew it would happen eventually, and so did Ravenbeck,” Leigh answered, tying his bag of books onto the blue’s harness. “They know, as long as they surrender, they won’t be hurt.”

“It’s more important to get back to Sweftnest before we’re spotted,” Sniper agreed.

“Then let’s go, aye,” Synrapchick nodded.

She focused for a moment, and Sniper watched her change her skin and feather color. He wasn’t sure how she did it, but it was her strongest Maho skill; she was an expert at self-camoufl age. When she was done, in about a minute, she matched the color of the sky, except for a few feathers that stayed stubbornly red: dull red. She tugged at them impatiently. Sniper gave her a look of disappointment.

“I’m molting, stupid human,” she snapped at him. “They won’t change anymore, aye.”

“Oh well,” he shrugged, pulling himself up onto her back. “I’m sure you did your best.”

She growled, but he ignored it, laughing silently behind her head.

The two dragons, both blue now and carrying their human loads, climbed up the rock and launched silently into the sky. They stayed low over the trees, hoping to avoid being spotted by the Wostian dragons who would have likely landed by now, and headed north towards the distant glacier, but they wouldn’t be going that far. Th ough it would have taken several days on foot, by evening they would reach the secret hideout—Sniper almost chuckled just thinking of it: a secret hideout, “no gurlz alowt”—called Sweftnest: city of myth among the mountain foothills.