Orm said, “Then we’d better get busy,” and slid down from the dragon. He still towered over Lewin. Orm is huge. As soon as he was down, the black dragon lumbered across to the van and started taking it to bits. That brought other dragons coasting, whistling in from all sides of the valley, to crunch to earth and hurry to the van, too. In seconds it was surrounded by black and green-brown shapes the size of hay barns. And Orm talked, at the top of his voice, through the sound of metal tearing, and big claws screaming on iron, and wings clapping, and angry grunts when two dragons happened to get hold of the same piece of van. Orm always talks a lot. But this time he was being particularly garrulous, to give the dragons time to lumber away with their pieces of van, hide them, and come back. “They won’t even do what Orm says until they’ve got their metal,” I whispered to Terens, who got rather impatient with Orm.
Orm said the best place to put people was the high valley at the center of the Reserve. “There’s an old she-drake with a litter just hatched,” he said. “No one will get past her when she’s feared for her young. I’ll speak to her. But the rest are to promise me she’s not disturbed.” As for telling everyone at the farms where to come, Orm said the dragons could do that, provided Lewin could think of a way of sending a message by them. “You see, most folk can’t hear a dragon when it speaks,” he said. “And some who can hear”—with a nasty look at me—“speak back to wound.” He was still very angry with me. I kept on the other side of Terens and Alectis when the dragons all came swooping back.
Terens set the memo block to repeat and tapped out an official message from Lewin. Then he tore off page after page with the same thing on it. Orm handed each page to a dragon, saying things like “Take this to the fat cow up at Hillfoot.” Or “Drop this on young vinegar lady at Crowtop—hard.” Or “This is for Dopey at High Jiot, but don’t give it her; give it to her youngest husband or they’ll never get moving.”
Some of the things he said made me laugh a lot. But it was only when Alectis asked what was so funny and Neal kicked my ankle that I realized I was the only one who could hear the things Orm said. Each dragon, as it got its page, ran down the valley and took off, showering us with stones from the jump it gave to get higher in the air than usual. Their wings boom when they fly high. Orm took off on the black dragon last of all, saying he would go and warn the she-drake.
Lewin crumpled his face ruefully at the few bits of van remaining, and we set off to walk to the valley ourselves. It was a long way. Over ling slopes and up among boulders in the kyles we trudged, looking up nervously every so often when fat bluish Slaver fliers screamed through the clouds overhead. After a while our dragons began booming overhead, too, seaward to roost. Terens counted them and said every one we had sent seemed to have come back now. He said he wished he had wings. It was sunset by the time we reached the valley. By that time Lewin was bent over, holding his chest and swearing every other step. But everyone was still pretending, in that stupid Dragonate way, that he was all right. We came up on the cliffs, where the kyle winds down to the she-drake’s valley, and there was the sunset lighting the sea and the towers of rock out there, and the waves crashing around the rocks, where the young dragons were flying to roost, and Lewin actually pretended to admire the view. “I knew a place like this on Seven,” he said. “Except there were trees instead of dragons. I can’t get used to the way Eight doesn’t have trees.”
He was going to sit down to rest, I think, but Orm came up the kyle just then. Huffle was hulking behind him. “So you got here at last!” Orm said in his rudest way.
“We have,” said Lewin. “Now would you mind telling me what you were playing at bringing those charges against Siglin?”
“You should be glad I did. You’d all be in a slaveship now if I hadn’t,” Orm said.
“But you weren’t to know that, were you?” Terens said.
“Not to speak of risking being charged yourself,” added Lewin.
Orm leaned on his hand against Huffle, as you might against a wall. “She half killed this dragon!” he said. “That’s why! All I did was ask her for a kiss, and she screams and lays into poor Huffle. My own daughter, and she tries to kill a dragon! And I thought, Right, my lady, then you’re no daughter of mine anymore! And I flew Huffle’s mother straight into Holmstad and laid charges. I was that angry! My own father tended dragons, and his mother before him. And my daughter tried to kill one! You wonder I was angry?”
“Nobody told me!” I said. I had that draining-away feeling again.
I was quite glad when Terens took hold of my elbow and said something like “Steady, steady!”
“Are you telling the truth?” Neal said.
“I’m sure he is,” Lewin said. “Your sister has his eyes.”
“Ask Timas,” said Orm. “He married your mother the year after I did. He can take being bossed about. I can’t. I went back to my dragons. But I suppose there’s a record of that?” he said challengingly to Lewin.
“And the divorce,” said Lewin. “Terens looked it up for me. But I expect the Slavers have destroyed it by now.”
“And she never told you?” Orm said to me. He wagged his shaggy eyebrows at me almost forgivingly. “I’ll have a bone to pick with her over that,” he said.
Mother arrived just as we’d all got down into the valley. She looked very indomitable, as she always does on horseback, and all our people were with her, down to both our shepherds. They had carts of clothes and blankets and food. Mother knew the valley as well as Orm did. She used to meet Orm there when she was a girl. She set out for the Reserve as soon as she heard the broadcast about the invasion, and the dragon we sent her met them on the way. That’s Mother for you. The rest of the neighbors didn’t get there for some hours after that.
I didn’t think Mother’s face—or Timas’s—could hold such a mixture of feelings as they did when they saw Neal and me and the Dragonate men all with Orm. When Orm saw Mother, he folded his arms and grinned. Huffle rested his huge chin on Orm’s shoulder, looking interested.
“Here she comes,” Orm said to Huffle. “Oh, I do love a good quarrel!”
They had one. It was one of the loudest I’d ever heard. Terens took Neal and me away to help look after Lewin. He turned out to have broken some ribs when the blast hit the van, but he wouldn’t let anyone look even until I ordered him to. After that Neal, Alectis, and I sat under our hay cart and talked, mostly about the irony of Fate. You see, Neal has always secretly wished Fate had given him Orm as a father, and I’m the one that’s got Orm. Neal’s father is Timas. Alectis says he can see the likeness. We’d both gladly swap. Then Alectis confessed that he’d been hating the Dragonate so much that he was thinking of running away, which is a serious crime. But now the Slavers have come, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a Dragonate anymore, he feels quite different. He admires Lewin.
Lewin consented to rest while Terens and Mother organized everyone into a makeshift camp in the valley, but he was up and about again the next day, because he said the Slavers were bound to come the day after, when they found the holdings were deserted. The big black she-drake sat in her cave at the head of the kyle, with her infants between her forefeet, watching groups of people rushing around to do what Lewin said, and didn’t seem to mind at all. Huffle said she’d been bored and bad-tempered up to then. We made life interesting. Actually that she-drake reminds me of Mother. Both of them made me give them a faithful report of the battle.
I don’t think the Slavers knew about the dragons. They just knew that there was a concentration of people in here, and they came straight across the Reserve to get us. As soon as the dragons told Orm they were coming, Lewin had us all out hiding in the hills in their path, except for Mother and Timas and Inga’s mother and a few more who had shotguns. They had to stay and guard the little kids in the camp. The rest of us had any weapons we could find. Neal and Alectis had bows and arrows. Inga had her airgun. Donal and most of the farmers had scythes. The shepherds all had their slingshots. I was in the front with Lewin, because I was supposed to stop the effect of the Slavers’ collars. Orm was there, too, although nobody had ever admitted in so many words that Orm might be heg. All Orm did was to ask the dragons to keep back because we didn’t want them enslaved by those collars.