Ever so slowly, she got up.

“Trust,” she said, using Drakine. Badly, but he understood the world.

“Trust,” she repeated, moving toward him. She went down on her hands and knees, and put her head below his.

“Trust,” she said, reaching out ever so gently to tickle him under the chin. He stifled an involuntary prrum. She turned something beneath his snout, and drew out a long metal pin. His muzzle fell away, and he opened his aching mouth.

“Will you remember this night, I wonder,” she said, backing away from his young sharp teeth. He smelled her fear now—no, it was just tension.

“Trust,” he said in Parl, as badly as she spoke Drakine. He must find out the weakness of dragons she’d mentioned. But first, there was something just as important—

He flung himself against his bonds, not at her, but at the green. He broke free of the wall, trailing chain and eyebolt. He clawed at the chains with his bagged sii, then reached an arm up and chewed the bag off his foreleg, losing a hatchling tooth in the thick leather. He tasted his own blood.

“Run! You have no time,” Hazeleye hissed, her ear cocked towards sounds of alarm from above.

Auron tick-thump-thumped across the deck to the green, his claw and three bagged feet making it a strange waddle. He touched his nose to hers, and her eyes opened in surprise. She had bright white-gold eyes, brighter than his mother’s or his sister’s.

“What is your name?” Auron thought.

“Natasatch, you blockhead,” she thought back.

Auron broke contact and scrambled up the wooden steps to the hatchway. He thumped it open with a head-butt. Once it gave way, he heard Hazeleye scream “Ware! A dragon’s loose!”

Auron climbed onto the tilted deck, found sailors of the night-watch running to gather sailcloth and rope. He opened his mouth to threaten them and smelled the clean sea coming in over the side of the ship on a welcome breeze. The air smelled like freedom—he ran toward it.

A skinny sailor, braver or less experienced than the rest, grabbed at the iron links dragging behind him as he neared the rail. Auron lashed with his tail, catching him on the temple, then turned and snapped his teeth shut, just missing the young man’s face. The youth released the chain, sat upright, and scuttled backwards with a speed that gave Auron more satisfaction than anything since he had been captured. He heard water foaming against the side of the ship somewhere below in the darkness, and shot under the rail and over the ship’s side.

He tucked his legs to his sides as he dived, plunging into the water like an arrow. Without even reading the stars, he felt the ship was heading north, so he was on the wrong side of the vessel. He opened his eyes with water-lids lowered, then pivoted under the hull of the ship.

The chains dragged at him. He had to thrash to move through the water, and at a pace he’d never be able to keep up for with them trailing long behind him. He broke the surface at the far side of the ship and chewed his other foreclaw free. He could see nothing on the horizon to the east over the gentle swell.

The ship was his prison, but it did float. He pressed his legs to the side and wiggled his hips, shoulder, and tail to swim to the part under the overhang of the back. Swimming would be so easy if it weren’t for the metal dangling beneath him, and the weight of his collars. He clung on to the wood of the ship with his good claw as he freed his hind legs, chewing through the leather bags. He lost teeth in the process, but they were just hatchling teeth.

Spitting blood, he looked at the collar under his arms. That wretched human had somehow fixed it in a way that he could not see how to get it off. But he might be able to break the chain dragging at him. He clamped his teeth to the wooden wing that steered the ship and curled his spine, bringing his bigger back legs to the loops of the chain. He fixed his claws in the convenient holds and called on what reserves of strength he had, pretending he had a dwarf to gut under his hind legs.

Auron’s legs, so long confined, hardly had the power to keep their grip, but the muscles in his back broke the chain, and its accursed links went to the bottom unregretted. He heard man voices above, searching the sea for him, but the ship did not stop. He re-gripped the back of the ship and managed to get the chain of the neck collar off as well. He tried to slip the metal collar off his head, but he couldn’t remove it without taking his head with it.

He panted after the effort, legs shaking with fatigue. Thank the egg that sheltered me, they’re useless when swimming. More and more men were going to the rail around the ship; sooner or later one might think to look under the stern. He closed his water-lids again and swam underwater from the ship, into the pathless ocean. He might exhaust himself, he might sink, but he’d do it as a free dragon.

Chapter 8

Seawater provided a strange buoyancy. It lifted him, like an updraft in his parents’ memories of flying.

If it weren’t for the collars, he’d swim forever, Auron thought. He found he could course along in the water with just his nose and eyes above the surface. With his great lungs full of air, staying afloat needed no effort at all. Which was as well, for as he swam steadily east he found he needed more and more drifting breaks.

He realized it was fortunate he didn’t have heavy scales. The sea would not have been so kind to him with a thick layer of armor all around his body. He remembered Mother’s words about weaknesses not always being weaknesses, and he turned on his back and stretched his legs in the air until he sank for the pure joy of it. The fresh air, exercise, and stimulating seawater, after his confinement in wagon and ship’s hold, brought him back from the torpor of captivity into something like the exhilaration he felt after his first kill with Wistala. He looked to the stars and wondered about her.

Mental state or no, his body needed rest, food, and water. He drank some seawater, but it gave him cramps. He had heard the sea was full of fish, but on his short dives, even with water-lids raised and the sea stinging his eyes, he saw nothing to eat. He bit at some floating gob of translucence that night, and it somehow hurt him on the armpit and neck, raising welts that still pained him two days later as the waves began to rise when the Air and Water Spirits took up arms.

He floated out the mild storm, feeling it push him north. Though he could not see the stars, something in him told him he was far away from home, impossibly far from Wistala and Father. When the weather lifted, he searched the horizons anxiously, hoping for sign of land. His laps thrusting himself eastward grew briefer and briefer.

The sight of birds flying east the afternoon after the storm gave him heart. Sure enough, they soared above the next day, and moved back east at night. He followed them as best he could, trying to rest less and swim more despite hunger and thirst, until the next morning when he saw the dawn break over a bump on the horizon.

Sun! Glorious Sun revealed land to him. So that was why dragons used their wings, to rise to the Sun and play nearer to Her! Father had spoken of the Spirits and the Upper World, but Auron took an oath to himself that if he ever had hatchlings, he would teach them first and foremost to be grateful to the Sun, She who showered the Upper World with life-giving light.

As the giddiness faded he struggled toward the bump on the horizon, swimming across the current. The last struggle. The land disappeared, and for a time he feared he had been having visions brought on by swallowing seawater. Then he saw it again, a blue smear on the horizon.

It was too much for him. He stopped and rested. Every moment floating in the current dragged him north, away from the land. He clamped his teeth and started the long labor of body and tail again. He fixed his eyes on the land, and swam and swam until he felt it more desirable to sink and die.

A strange clarity broke through Auron’s veil of despair. He knew he was being faced with the first great struggle of his life. Not against foe, not against fate, not against even the sea. The true battle was within him. His will to live was losing the battle, outnumbered by a tired body, achingly empty innards, and a bled-dry spirit ready to abandon the struggle.

If my mind wants to give up, I’ll ignore it and concentrate on my body. That way my will only has one enemy to fight.

He shut his eyes and sank until just the tip of his nose stood above the waves. He swam through pain, swam through exhaustion, swam past death of hope. Nothing would stop his body unless his heart ceased to beat, and he decided he would force that to keep pumping if it came to a test. . . . And so he touched sand.

He lifted his head out of the water. Waves were pushing him up to a beach, beneath upright rocks huddled together like a family of giants crowned by bird droppings. Gulls and split-tailed avians he had no word for floated above on the air, ignoring his struggle. He felt more like a corpse than like a dragon. He couldn’t even drag himself out of the water; it pushed and rolled him up onto the beach like a piece of driftwood. The feel of being on dry land sickened him. He knew he was not moving, but the ground still seemed to lift him up and set him down as regularly as the waves. He gave in to his fatigue and let go of consciousness.

A pinch in his nostril woke him. A little creature standing on legs like claws pulled at his flesh with a snipping little hand, holding a second giant mandible before it like a warrior brandishing a shield.