The Last Dragon: Book Two

CHAPTER THREE

W ith Kendra’s painful reaction, I ignored the dragon and raced to her side. She lay curled on the stone floor in a fetal position, eyes wide open and staring at nothing. But she breathed. I went to the tub and peered carefully into it, or the well, or whatever it was, from a short distance. Inside lay a cream-colored, soft, white mass, the surface resembling clay baked for dinner plates. There were no decorations. The rounded mound nearly filled the bottom of the container, as I now thought of it, from side to side—as if constructed for holding the thing. The top of the object was near enough to reach down and touch.

“What is it?” I whispered.

She stood and joined me. “An egg. A dragon’s egg.”

It could be nothing else. She was right, although the egg was so large my arm couldn’t reach around it when stretched out. The entire time we examined the egg, the dragon stood aside and watched us critically, her eyes smoldering and now and then she snorted with irritation when we got too close. When I reached out to touch the egg, the dragon shifted and became angry, so I retracted my hand and waited.

My voiced whispered as if the dragon couldn’t hear me because I didn’t wish to make it angrier, as if that were possible. “What is an egg doing here?”

My sister turned to gaze at the dragon as if that might calm the beast. Her voice was also soft and mellow. “We’ve answered one question. This thing, this vat, was created here to incubate or hold an egg. Have you felt the stone at our feet? It’s warm.”

My feet were warm, as she’d suggested. My hand went to the side of the well, nest, or whatever it was. The bare rock should have been cold, especially since it was still in the shade on a cool spring morning. Instead, it felt as warm as my skin, not hot. About the same as touching a person.

“This isn’t natural,” I said as if suddenly discovering a new thing.

Kendra moved along the rear wall while touching it in several places, as well as bending to touch the floor. “All warm. It’s like the rock here is making heat.”

“Your dragon friend looked like she was going to eat me when I reached for the egg. She is very protective.”

“Why did you do that?” Kendra asked. “It was stupid.”

“It seemed natural to do. What if it’s not an egg? Something else? I guess it was just instinct to touch it, like touching a flower vase or a statue.”

She turned after rolling her eyes at me and walked back to the container under the watchful eyes of the dragon. Without hesitation, she reached her palm out and placed it inside, on the white, rounded object. The dragon went rigid, barely breathing, but didn’t attack. Kendra moved her hand gently along the surface, then pushed. Where she did, a small hollow formed. It wasn’t rigid like a hen’s egg. She watched it return to the original shape before turning to me.

“It’s alive.”

“How can you tell?”

She said, “Inside, there is movement. A beating heart.”

“What does that mean?” I wondered aloud. “Is it going to hatch? If it does, will whatever emerges be hungry and threaten us?”

Her face flashed anger or fear, but not at my insipid words. Her eyes had briefly gone wider, her face stern. She pulled her knife and held it in front of her defensively, although I wasn’t sure she was aware of her actions.

Looking up, where her eyes were fixed, and I pulled my sword. At least five Wyverns were silently approaching, making no noise even while rapidly flapping their immense wings. They made no warning cries and flew higher in the sky than I’d ever seen. However, the dragon had also spotted them, and she had already spread her wings in anticipation. She leaped off the side of the mountain. The wind from her first few strokes almost knocked us over. The Wyverns knew they’d been discovered and screeched their battle cries, almost as one.

Two of them turned directly at the dragon. Instead of evading, the dragon opened her mouth and roared back at them. As the distance between them closed to nothing, the dragon shifted her weight and reached out with her jaws to grab the nearest Wyvern. Her powerful teeth nearly cut it in half, then she shook it side to side twice and let it go. The dead creature fell near the bank of the river.

The second wyvern hadn’t learned from the misadventure of the first. It swooped in too close, trying to take a bite out of a leg, and the dragon’s head shot out and grasped the tip of one wing in her jaws. She shook it, twisting and turning before ripping off a third of the wing. The second wyvern spiraled down out of control. It was dead when it hit the rocks.

Kendra screamed, “Damon!”

My senses returned, but in my defense, who in the world had ever seen such great beasts fight? Or can blame me for watching? I pulled my attention away from the dragon. A wyvern had separated from the others and flew behind us. It was diving at the vessel with the egg.

That was what the attack above was about. A diversion. The dragon had cleared the rubble from the incubator, and now the Wyverns attacked and tried to kill the egg—no doubt at the urging of a mage controlling them from some safe, comfortable location. I pictured him sitting in an easy chair near a warm fire as he directed the battle.

My sword was light, shorter than most, but sharper. It curved along the leading edge, just a slight curve to give it perfect balance. I’d practiced for days with Kendra and Elizabeth holding a fruit or other object head-high, my sword in its scabbard, my hand on the hilt. They gave no warning before dropping the fruit. My blade sliced it in half every time, and the return stroke sliced a half into quarters.

Well, not at first. The first few times we’d tried to do it at the urging of the Weapons-Master, the fruit usually hit the floor before my blade cleared leather. A year later, some were sliced. After a second year, most were sliced twice.

All those memories flashed through my mind as our practice proved valuable. In a single lunge-step ahead, my sword slashed across the leg of the wyvern as it landed and reached for the egg with its mouth, unmindful of me. The leg was larger than mine, but the blade sliced deep. The return swing of my blade took off two toes, as the snakelike dragon beat its wings to escape my fury and another stroke.

“Damon!” Kendra screamed, again. Her eyes were focused somewhere behind me. I dropped to the floor just as another wyvern attacked from behind me. The slash of the talons missed me, but it landed on the flat surface facing Kendra. Its momentum carried it forward, and there was no time, nor a place for her to escape.

Without hesitation, instead of running away, Kendra darted forward and attacked with her knife, as I charged five steps to reach it before the head at the end of the sinewy neck could reach out and snap at her. Kendra’s action carried her nearly under the wyvern where the mouth couldn’t strike at her. Not yet, as it fought to regain its balance after landing. Despite all my training, always teaching me to slice, never stab, I stabbed deeply into the animal, just above where the long tail met the body because that was the only target I could reach from behind. A slice of a cut might not slow it enough, so I drove the blade in deep.

The sword penetrated to half its length, and I used my legs for leverage to force it the rest of the way, up to the hilt. The wyvern threw its head back, as it swung its whip-like tail at me. The tail struck me hip-high and threw me tumbling across the flat area, dangerously close to the edge where there was no stopping my fall. My sword was still stuck into her as she turned to attack.

I glanced over the side of the mountain and found nothing but air until reaching the bottom a thousand steps below. My eyes returned to the enraged animal. It squatted slightly, in preparation to leap. However, as it turned to attack me, it presented the hilt of my sword to my sister. Kendra leaped, pulled my sword free and slashed at the thigh of the Wyvern. She managed a second and a third cut before leaping back out of its reach when it spun on her.

The wyvern now concentrated on advancing to her. Kendra ducked behind a boulder taller than her head, and darted from the other side, my sword swinging again, this time cutting across the soft meat on the dragon’s breast. Kendra kept running as she made that cut, reaching another pile of boulders before diving under one for temporary safety.

The wounded wyvern had enough as it turned away and started to fly off. It spread its wings and pumped them violently as it looked up into the sky and found the true dragon descending so fast it may have been falling. The much larger dragon landed on top of the Wyvern, twisted and grasped the smaller one in its teeth and threw it to one side, as it looked up and around to find the others it wanted to kill.

They were flying away as fast as possible, only two of them remained. One looked over its shoulder and screamed, but the sound was not a war-cry this time. It was fear.

Heavy, thick wyvern blood from our fight coated everything around us. Walking was slippery. Kendra slumped against the warm stone. The shadows of the morning sun shown on the carved icons bringing the carvings into deep relief with dark shadows. With sudden recognition, I knew where I’d seen them before.

Kendra followed my gaze. She said, “The Waystone.”

She was right. Castle Crestfallen was built on the side of a mountain at the other end of the kingdom, days away, where the foothills grew in height to become the base of the Jawtooths, the impassable mountain range with no mountain pass to cross them. On the very road we’d traveled with Tater, and Princess Elizabeth was a stone monument along the way that we called the Waystone.

It was far taller than the tub in front of us but made of similar granite and looked to me like a giant had baked a loaf of bread as large as a house and stuck it in the ground. It had then turned to stone. Two-thirds of the loaf was left exposed. The stone was smooth, the same color as the one in front of us, not the normal sandy-tan color of the other rocks near Crestfallen.

More than that, there were carvings. I’d examined them more than once, trying to determine what they meant, who made them, or how long ago. There were five cartouches, the same number as here. Intricate but different designs, each surrounded by a frame. All five frames were alike, giving the impression the contents of each cartouche meant something in itself. Three of the five had small figures besides the slashes and hash marks that I thought of as houses. Or, they were an unknown form of writing. Others had decided they were directions, probably because of the name, Waystone.

With the sun shining at a slanting angle on the carvings in front of me, I saw in one frame the same three simplified icons that might represent houses. While I didn’t know anything else, I instantly knew the granite rock was the same color, and so were the carvings. Well, that was not totally true because I couldn’t remember what else was carved on the Waystone at home, but what I did know, was that they were related.

“Are you hurt?” Kendra asked.

“No, I’m fine. Just a few bruises. Remember when we explored the Waystone with Elizabeth? We copied the five drawings and tried to find anyone able to read them?”

She turned from me and to the well and saw it instantly, even though she had been the first to notice the similarities. Now she saw it was more than similarities. They held the same five carvings on the sides as she circled the tub. “I do. They’re the same.”

The dragon still watched the wyvern disappear into the distance and chose that time to move. It lumbered closer and briefly sniffed me, then moved on to Kendra, probably smelling the wyvern blood covering us and not liking it at all. Kendra tossed me my sword, pommel first, and my hand snatched it from the air. The blade was still coated with blood. As I wiped it with a mage’s robe, the material snagged. That shouldn’t have happened with a perfect cutting edge. I turned the blade to examine the edge.

A nick the size of a fingernail trimming was on it. Tears welled. It had been a gift from our king and was more valuable than words can express. Malawian steel, he’d said, as he presented it to me. The only sword like it in the Kingdom of Dire. Malawi hadn’t existed for a hundred years, and the process for making the fine steel was a lost secret. Only a few were skilled enough to make the required repair, none in our kingdom.

Kendra hadn’t seen the damage to my sword, and I didn’t know if she or I had done it during the battle. She said in a solemn manner of discovery, “They were sent here to kill the egg, not us or the dragon.”

“The Wyverns?”

She nodded, “Us, and the dragon were not important. The egg was. They were controlled from afar. I felt in my head as the mental orders told them to fight us first. The attack was not the Wyvern’s fault.”

“Like the mage that controlled the husk of Stata. He tried to kill us along with the men from Kondor at the summit of the pass,” I added. “But not blaming Wyverns will be hard for me. Every time one comes near, from now on, my sword will be drawn.”

Kendra shrugged as if to tell me she agreed and expected no less. She said, “What exactly is a Waystone, I wonder?”

“Big rocks with carvings. That’s all I know.”

“There are two of them. One at home. One here. Made by the same people. Mages can use magic created by the dragon from this place while they are days away from here. It’s all connected, and to right here.”

“Are there any more Waystones?” I asked. Anywhere else in Dire?”

She snapped her fingers and smiled as if my words had impressed her. “You are the smartest man I know.”

The compliment would have been more inspiring if she had not slightly stressed the word, man. She had not answered my question, either. She sat down on a large outcrop and closed her eyes in concentration.

The dragon blinked several times in succession and settled down to sit with its belly on the ground as it watched her. Again, it struck me how awkward and ungainly dragons are when on the ground.

“Waystone,” she muttered loud enough for me to hear over the soft wind. “Way. Which way? Going a long way? Directions carved in stone?”

I said, breaking her rambling, “That’s what I always thought. A stone that told which way to go. A signpost, but larger.”

She gave me the look of disappointment that erased her earlier compliment. “Which way to go, you think it means that? However, in Crestfallen, you are already at the upper end of the kingdom, with a ring of impassable mountains directly behind. There is only one direction you can go: Down the mountain on the same road we took. You don’t need a Waystone to know you have to go down from there, or that you have reached the end of the road if you’re going the other way.”

Trying to redeem myself, I added, “The rock it’s made of is the same kind as here, not the same as that around our home. That always struck me as odd that the one at home didn’t match the surrounding rock.”

“Are you sure?”

“This is the exact same color, not like the usual brown rock at Crestfallen. Smooth like it, too. I wish I’d have felt the one at home to see if it’s also warm.”

The idle comment brought her to her feet as her face flushed.

“What is it?” My eyes searched for more Wyverns attacking as my hand reached for my sword.

“Snow. It always melts first around the Waystone at home, leaving a clear circle. I had dismissed it, but you just reminded me. In spring, travelers pitch their tents near it to keep warm, and so they don’t sleep on snow.”

“The sun warms the rock during the day, and it gives off heat until after dark. Simple to explain,” I told her as if I knew what I was talking about. Besides, I’d heard that explanation once when others discussed the Waystone at Crestfallen.

She began to pace the open area, walking almost to the dragon without even seeing it, then back again. “Maybe. What if I told you it does the same thing in deep winter, and when there has been no sun for days? It still melts the snow near it.”

“Is that true?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, but I intend to find out. This stone was warmer than the air early in the morning. That was before the sun came up. Warmth uses energy. Or magic. There is another thought about Waystones that is going around and around in my head. Waystone. Like two different words. We know what stone is. It’s the material they are made of. Way, in Waystone, may be the key, something different than we’ve considered.”

“That’s understandable, so far. What else? Besides, I don’t yet see why that is important.”

She grinned. “Directions. What if way does not mean directions as we always assumed, like a signpost. What if way means a method, as in telling me the way to build this? Or like going away. Or way over there.”

She paused and waited for me to catch up. My mind took in what she began and carried to a better conclusion. “A way is also a road, or a track, or pathway. A place to travel upon.”

Kendra inhaled deeply and said, “So, a Waystone could be a way to travel from one place to another?”

“It could be,” I told her, expecting another of our arguments to begin, so I spoke quickly, “But if it meant road, it would just say so. Be a lot easier. Same with a signpost. Each would be different because of providing directions to different places.”

“I believe you’re exactly right.”

“Why?” the statement had me speechless. She hadn’t even attempted to contradict or correct me.

She came and sat with her knees almost touching mine as she leaned closer and spoke intently, “I heard a child’s story one time. A mage needed information that could only be found far away across the sea where a great battle raged. A day later, the mage returned from his solitary ‘meditation’ with the information of the battle, and he swore it was correct. A month later it was confirmed when a ship arrived with the truth from the battle across the sea, but the mage had already disappeared, never to be seen again.”

I considered it. There were too many truths to ignore in her children’s story. “That sounds more like a factual event that was passed on as a child’s story to conceal it.”

She smiled. “It does. What better way to discredit a story than to turn it into a fairytale?”

We’d accomplished the climb, found an egg we didn’t know what to do with, fought at the side of a dragon against Wyverns, and perhaps decoded one of the mysteries of the Waystones. Not a bad start before midday. Common sense said to stop there, but one or two small things niggled at the back of my mind. “Kendra, remember those four small stones piled up on the stairs?”

“Of course.”

“Any vibration, even a small puff of wind would have knocked them down.”

“Go on,” she said in a leading sort of way that told me she was getting more interested.

“The little depressions in the steps from all the feet walking on them held water. None of it was cloudy, and there was enough dirt to make mud in several places. No footprints were in the mud. No person climbed those stairs before us this morning.”

She finished for me, “But something piled those stones within the last day.”

“Are we being watched again?”

As if in answer, a faint blue light winked into existence before us. The light shimmered and formed into the outlined shape of a woman in a long dress. We’d encountered her before and called her the Blue Woman, but before either of us spoke, the light faded and disappeared. In the distance, it sounded like the tinkling of laughter amid the breaking of glass coming from far down the mountainside, but it may have been my imagination.