The only thing left to do was convince the dragon of my plan.
“Skree-ip?” I heard a chirrup behind me, to see that Ymmen had silently followed me out of the cave. His eyes were gold, shot through with the reflected red of the sunset. I felt as though I didn’t even have to tell him what I had been planning, but I did anyway. “Ymmen, noble dragon,” I said, bowing my head in the most reverential way that I had seen my mother greet the Imanus from other tribes.
“I want to try and stop… that from happening over there.” I pointed in the direction of the work camp, and Ymmen hissed in agreement.
“I know someone, a human, who might have the answers.” I thought of Abioye’s strange confession in the Western Tunnel, that he hoped ‘we can all be free’ – did he mean free from his sister? It was a tiny hope, but right now we needed all of the hope that we could get.
“He might know how to put an end to those things,” I felt my top lip curl in disgust as I thought about Inyene’s dragons, just as Ymmen’s top lip did the same. The feeling of indignation was burning between us, a shared fire that we warmed our rage upon.
“And my family, my friends, my people – they are being held prisoner by the one to blame for those creations. They are not free. They cannot feel the high or low winds on their faces, as we can,” I said gravely, not knowing how to address a dragon really.
Ymmen, in response, cocked his head to look at me, and blinked slowly. “Bones. Blood and Scales.” The outraged thought hit me again, and the burning hatred I felt in the dragon’s heart was enough to make me gasp. He stood up slowly, walking daintily around us to stand expectantly on the edge of the ledge.
“He agrees,” I said quickly to Tamin. “I will be back as soon as I can. And I will be as careful as I can,” I promised, forestalling his inevitable advice.
“Be your mother’s daughter,” Tamin said gravely – which was the highest praise as well as the most serious task that anyone could ask of me.
“I’ll try.” I nodded, turning to reach up to the dragon’s front leg, intending to climb it and find any space I could hunker down on Ymmen’s back.
But the black dragon had other ideas of how I would be traveling, apparently. With a rush of air, he unfurled his wings with a thunderous snap! The blast pushed me back several paces, and I saw, above me, that he had flung from his wings the greenish ‘scale’ of the healing poultice that I had made, and in its place was a white lightning branch of healed skin. It was incredible how quickly it had worked, and I thought again of what Ymmen had told me of his gifts before: Fire. Strength. Sun.
With another beat of his reformed wings he had hopped several meters into the air, and once again I felt that thump as his claws clamped over me and pulled me up into the skies. I heard a sharp intake of breath from Tamin below, but by the time that I managed to look down he was now just a doll figure, small on the ledge below and raising one fist above his head.
Without pausing, the dragon dipped his wings and we swooped down into the gorge at the foot of the cliff below us, and Ymmen once again snapped his wings where the gorge widened out, and we were in the air, higher than before.
For a moment I was lost in the exhilaration of flight, feeling the crisp mountain air on my face as we wheeled and turned. Ymmen was turning away from the northeast and the workcamp, and instead taking me southwest, around the back of the Masaka where the light was still strong.
“We have to be quiet!” I gasped, my throat burning with the cold of the air. “Quiet and unseen.” I thought about hunting on the Plains, creeping through the tall grasses and pausing every now and again as our hunting parties fanned out.
“Ha!” Ymmen’s voice of fire surged into my mind with an accompanying snort of fire above me. “I know how to hunt, child,” he said – but I could sense no disdain from him, just amusement. In that moment, through our bond, I got a sense of just how old Ymmen had to be. It made me imagine a measure of how it might go between us – with him being the more willful, even than I?
We’ll see about that! I thought. I was still the woman who had, after all, shouted at him the first time we had met.
“Strong. That is why.” The dragon’s disjointed thoughts, along with his mirth, flowed through my mind like hot steam. He was saying that was why he bonded with me? Or that was why he hadn’t eaten me?
“Both,” he answered, as he took me on the long, circuitous route around the far side of the Masaka to eventually turn into a place where the Masaka ended and the next mountain – Old Giant – began. I had never been this far north before, and I saw that there was a pass where the two mountains held themselves apart from other as if snubbing their rocky fellows.
And in the far bottom of that pass, was a thin ribbon of a road.
Where does it lead? I thought excitedly. I realized then, with some chagrin, just how close I had come to it on my previous escape attempts. Another day of traveling on foot, two or three of hiding perhaps, and I would have reached it!
“Smelly people. Cities. Tasty cows,” Ymmen informed me, as a whole new revelation opened itself to my mind. Ymmen could read my thoughts!
“Thoughts?” The dragon sounded confused as he flicked his wings to bring us up the near edge of the Masaka, where there were many broken ledges and outcrops of rock. He alighted on one of these outcrops carefully and released me gently to scramble to the stone below. The sun had fallen at our backs in the West, but it was still warm. “Speak. Sing. Smell. Hear. See.” He dragon-explained to me – or tried to, but I couldn’t grasp what he was saying. It seemed that he didn’t have a word for thoughts, and the closest he could come was to name all the other senses and abilities he had.
“No! Speak. Sing!” Ymmen repeated in my mind more forcefully as he appeared to be waiting for something.
“You want me to sing to you?” I said, confused.
“Skrargh!” He gave another snort of flame and his large tail slapped against the rocks behind us. “Thoughts,” he repeated slowly, and I could feel his great impatience at how slow I was apparently being. “Songs.”
Thoughts are like songs? I thought. And then, in a flash I got it. The other creatures of the Plains had many senses that we humans did not. The buffalos would start lowing before the rains came. A dog or a wolf could smell game many, many leagues away. Surely, dragons must have senses that were far removed from our own! Maybe whatever happened inside their minds to them were songs, just as the wolves could smell prey on the wind.
“Not all songs. Just.” Ymmen struggled to put the words into my head. “Narissea.”
It was the first time he said my name, and when I looked up, he was regarding me with his golden eyes. He might think me slow, but I could feel no contempt from him. I opened my mouth to say thank you, although I wasn’t sure what for – but Ymmen was already raising his snout with a flick. Just like a boy who doesn’t want to seem weak, I thought, and earned another slap of a tail against the rocks behind me.
“Now. Hunting,” Ymmen said in my mind, and I turned my head to see what it was that the black dragon had been waiting for. The sun was well past fallen in the west, which meant that night was on its way in the east, aided by the tall and cold shadows of the World’s Edge Mountains, too. I couldn’t see the work camp from where we were perched, but I could imagine that it would be dark save for the circle of torch lights around the palisade walls.