The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Twenty-Two

Quara turned a questioning gaze towards Ausfela's as they waited for the water dragon to continue her explanation.  She was so stunned that she could hardly put two words together, even in her thoughts.  Although she could hardly be blamed for her silence and confusion, with her boots melted to her feet and a steady, excruciating pain growing as the adrenalin that had sustained her in the previous trials wore off.  She realized that the smoke was much less pervasive in the crater and that while she could still feel a slight rattling in her chest with each breath, she was no longer struggling to force air into her lungs.

Marella was an enormous creature, and as Quara counted the number of coils that held her sister, and added them to the length that was unfurled and snaked through the water, she guessed that she was at least three times longer than Ausfella.  She was much narrower though, and her scales were a smooth shimmering silver that blended, one into the next.  She had wings of a sort, although they looked as much like fins as they did wings made for the air, and Quara suspected that she would not be able to fly all that far out of the water, if she could take to the air at all.

"She swims, very, very quickly and then at full speed, she expands her wings and sort of skips across the surface, touching down now and then very briefly before gliding further along.  She has another set of smaller wing-fins further down, somewhere underwater."  Quara frowned at the dragon, who seemed to be hearing quite a few of her thoughts as the day progressed.  "It's not my fault if you're thinking loudly constantly now.  And most of the time you're thinking at me. Haven't you noticed."

"Follow me." Marella snaked through the water, still holding Lina aloft as she headed towards the island.

"She is breathing, right?  Will she be okay?" Quara spoke loudly so that the creature could hear her, and wondered if it could also read her thoughts if she spoke them at the serpent.

"Sea dragons communicate just as we land dragons do.  And she will be okay.  She has to be okay." Ausfela offered the answer to her unspoken question yet again, but the second part of her statement sounded very much like she was trying to convince herself that her words were true.

"She's breathing steadily, although she took quite a blow to the head." The serpent's voice was clear and crisp.  "If I had to guess I'd say she won't be feeling all that well when she wakes up.  But she will wake up.  She was lucky.  Not many have walked away from a battle with Grislingham in one piece.  Well, to be entirely honest, not many have walked away from battles with him at all.  I'm not entirely certain, but I don't believe he's ever been defeated.  He was and still is the nightmare of many strong, capable soldiers.  And what this child did today will cause many to give more weight to the prophecy than they have in many years."

"Grislingham?"  Ausfela made a choking sound, and stopped so suddenly that Quara lurched forward in her seat.

"You didn't know?"  Marella's expression was amused, but then she cast another glance at Lina and began to speed more rapidly through the water.   

They reached the edge of the island in a matter of moments.  Ausfela was flying low, so they were only a few lengths from Lina at any given moment. Every few flaps of her wings she would tear her gaze from Lina to look up at the red dragon, still thrashing and disoriented in the sky, although it appeared that he was trying to find a place to land on the rim, perhaps to reconsider his options.

Two women emerged from the dense forest that covered most of the island and lifted Lina from Marella's coils.  They were dressed in light blue linen fabric and both had hair dyed to match their brightly colored clothing.  After peering into their faces for a moment, as they busily worked to set Lina upon a sort of stretcher that they quickly lifted and began to carry away from the water's edge, Quara realized that they didn't seem altogether human.