More shouts, growing fainter in the night, and then one last, mighty whoosh from behind me and a crack of the dragon’s wings like a thunderclap. Even out here, I could smell the sudden acrid burn of smoke and fire, tinged with that note of sweeter frankincense.
He wouldn’t—he didn’t! I thought as my feet slowed, partly in trepidation, and partly due to the exhaustion the night had brought me.
“You still have much to learn,” Ymmen said, and once again, he sounded curt—even annoyed as his presence washed into my mind, and I felt a blast of cool air hit me from behind—and above.
Suddenly, I saw a flash in the dark as his claws folded over me and I was being swept up in his lizard arms, but he wasn’t rough. He folded his hands around me and hugged me to his warm chest as gently and as softly as if I were a babe. I knew then, so close to the massive double-beat of his heart, that Ymmen was as careful as he was strong.
We flew into the dark, leaving the fires and the Red Hounds behind us in disarray.
Chapter 9
The Race Begins
For a while, all I could be was silent as Ymmen flew through the night, and I digested everything that I had seen and that had happened to me tonight. It wasn’t the cruelty of men like Nol Baggar and the Pincher that disturbed me however; it was the fact that there was now another group of my people being held captive by others who saw them as little better than animals.
It’s my fault, I thought, as I blinked back tears. The land below us was dark, save for the occasional glimmer of the almost dried-up brooks or the startled scatter of plains antelopes from their hiding places. This was a sight and a time I had spent years longing for—I should be drinking it in, rejoicing in it—and yet all I could think of was how much I had failed everyone.
“What madness is this?” Ymmen chided me gently, his claws tightening just a fraction, the way that a cat might when it is happy, just the same as when it is angry.
“The Daza down Inyene’s mine…” I whispered into the night, the wind of our passage snatching the words from my mouth—but I knew that the dragon would hear and feel them, being this close to each other. “The Daza under Homsgud back at camp… The Daza with the Red Hounds…” I shook my head. I hadn’t got any closer to the Stone Crown yet, had I?
“Your hunt is not another’s, and neither is another’s folly your own,” Ymmen said, and for a moment I struggled to get his meaning—that I couldn’t save the other Daza, no matter what I did?
“No, Little Sister. That you are not Inyene. And neither are you this Homsgud. Or this Red Hound,” Ymmen said, and he sounded a little weary in my mind.
Oh great. I had managed to annoy perhaps the only other being alive that I felt closest to, I thought miserably.
“I am not annoyed, Nari,” Ymmen said sternly. “But I am worried. Always, it has been the same. Kings and Princes and Sorcerers trying to steal a dragon’s power to make it their own. This Inyene, and these Red Hounds are doing it again. We cannot let any of them win.”
I could sense his frustration at our situation, and I realized then that it almost perfectly mirrored mine. But Ymmen saw things from a dragon’s perspective, and with a dragon’s sense of time. Where I blamed myself and turned inward—Ymmen became agitated and angry.
“But, what can I do?” I asked. “Homsgud won’t allow Abioye to stop and try to rescue the other Daza. Not without a mutiny, I think…” And now that I knew for certain that Nol Baggar and his Red Hounds were after the Stone Crown too—suddenly I wasn’t in an expedition, I was in a race. Would I be able to make it to the Vault in time?
“You have my wings,” Ymmen said, and I could sense his eagerness to go; his dragon’s perspective again. And, I had to say that I wanted to. I wanted to turn and go now, to try and find the Giant’s Head and the Shifting Sands and past it, the Vault—right now.
Ymmen’s heart beat a little faster against me.
But, even as much as I dearly wanted to, I couldn’t. Abioye was wounded. And we needed to move the rest of the camp now that the Red Hounds were after us. There are still Daza left there with Homsgud, I thought bitterly. Either Inyene’s guard or Nol Baggar could make my people’s life hell.
“Hm.” Ymmen grumped at the back of my mind, but I could also feel his tentative agreement, for the moment. Neither he nor I knew the dangers that we would face ahead, and I would need at least Abioye, Tamin, and Montfre at my side.
“And you know that I cannot abandon the Daza to Homsgud,” I whispered.
“I know,” Ymmen growled in my heart. His frustration was plain, and I understood it only too well. But, in that dragon’s way that he had, he shook his mind free from the problem, turning instead to what lay before us.
“Here. You need this, Little Sister—and so do they.” Below us was a thick mound of vegetation—I saw the rise of the towering Spindle Trees, their branches holding clusters of long leaves like fans, growing out of the smaller trees, crowding around a glimmer of water.
The sky was graying, and below us I could see the mist already starting to rise and clutch at the edges of the vegetation. It was an oasis, and the call of Hooping birds rose to greet us.
“I haven’t got time,” I said sadly, thinking that I needed to get back to the rest of the camp, and check on the situation between Abioye and Homsgud.
“You do,” Ymmen ignored me, slowly circling the oasis as he swung around in a wide circle, getting lower and lower and making a high-pitched whistling sound.
And there, out of the edge of the oasis below, two figures emerged and started waving their hands up at us. One of the figures raised a staff with a crook near the top that I recognized—because I had been the one to carve that staff myself. A small ball of white radiance burst just above the upraised staff, welcoming us.
It was Montfre and Tamin.
“Little Nari!” my god-uncle was saying as he ran across the ground to me, his arms wide.
“Uncle!” I shouted, running forward as soon as Ymmen had gently set me down. Tamin wasn’t really my uncle of course—but he was the heart-friend of my mother, the Imanu, and I couldn’t remember a summer of my life when Tamin wasn’t there or wasn’t visiting from his new home in the Middle Kingdom—at least, that was, until the first summer I spent in Inyene’s mines...
Tamin had white hair, and he still wore the slave tunics that had been forced on him when he was conscripted into Inyene’s mines. I had been shocked and appalled to see him join me there—but knew that it made sense. Inyene must have seen my uncle as a thorn in her side with all the legal maneuvering he’d done to help my mother in her fight to regain my freedom, and so she did with him what she seemed to do with all of her problems—she silenced them. Tamin had been the one to try to challenge Inyene in the Middle Kingdom’s courts—and to take clerks out to the tribal lands to try and help them fight our new enemy.
My uncle was unusual for one of the Daza, and for one of our particular tribe, the Souda. He had realized at a young age, as ever more traders’ caravans struck out into the Plains from the three kingdoms—and bringing with them ever more Westerner bandit raids, too—that the Daza needed a voice in the three Kingdoms.