The Emerald Rider (Book Four of the Dragoneer Saga) Read online

  In her campaign to warn off possible threats to her eggs, she attacked and terrorized several nearby human towns. She scorched a human dwelling or two, and plundered their animal herds. She devoured a few humans as well. Humans aren’t very high up on a typical dragon’s preferred sustenance list, but to keep the rest of them frightened and wary of her nest, more than a half dozen men ended up in her belly. In her long life she had been lucky in her dealings with the pesky humans, but her luck in that area, as well as the luck of her two rambunctious hatchlings, was about to run out.

  The men came a short while after she left to hunt, and they came with murderous intent. The male hatchling woke to see his nest mate being roped by the angry men. He lashed out at them in a feeble attempt to save his sibling. He clawed one man to the ground and lashed another to the floor with his whip-like tail, but he was too small to do any real damage. Ultimately, he ended up tangled in a throw net the clever humans had brought. The humans paused to argue whether the two young dragons would be taken and sold or killed on the spot. If the mother dragon hadn’t returned during the argument, the latter is exactly what would have happened to both of them.

  With a single blast of her noxious breath, the mother roared out her anger at the intrusion, scorching several of the men to cinders. Then she unleashed her true fury on them. A purplish-turquoise blast of prismatic dragon magic erupted from her claw and pulverized the bones of two more of the attackers. A blade slid between her scales, but the pain only angered her further. Relentlessly, she went about destroying the men who violated her nest.

  The battle that followed was swift and bloody. Though she managed to slay all of the men and save the life of one of her precious young, she took several wounds that couldn’t be healed with her magic. Some of the wounds were mortal. She lived just over two days, and in that time she used her remaining energy to try and instill everything she could think of into her surviving hatchling’s mind. She wanted to increase his severely slim chances for survival any way she could. She named him Crimzathrion. He was only two days old when the men came, so he understood almost none of his dying mother’s melodic ravings, but she wisely cast a spell on her words so they would come to him again and again as he grew. It was all she could do to help him survive in a world full of ignorant men. He would have to find a way to prosper as a hunter while often being hunted himself.

  She let Crimzathrion feed on the human bodies she killed, but only because in her wounded condition, she could not hunt for him. She regretted this, because he was so young that he could grow used to the taste of them. She knew a young dragon might mistake the humans for easy prey. Though most of them were generally easy to kill, some were not. Some men were brave, and that made them dangerous. Beyond that, some humans were just plain lucky.

  The mother dragon died singing the complex, harmonious songs of magic to the hatchling. She sang the contagious songs of battle, the light and airy songs of flight, and all the songs her own mother sang to her. Then she cursed the Gods for her hatchling’s misfortune, as well as for her own. She managed to do more than she ever could have hoped possible to increase her hatchling’s chances for survival. She died listening to his persistent whine of hunger, knowing it meant all of the human flesh had been consumed. She couldn’t help but cry a tear of sadness for Crimzathrion as she passed into the Everland.

  The tear she cried crystallized as it fell. It thudded loudly on the rocky floor. Held inside its sparkling blue beauty was a wealth of magical power, born from love, pain, hope and misery.

  Now Crimzathrion lay against her cold, scaly body in a state of partial slumber, exhausted, hungry and afraid. Of all the lessons she’d forced so overwhelmingly upon him, the lesson of death was the one he learned best. He wouldn’t get to grow up feeling the immortality of youth. He understood all too well the nature of death, and the magnitude of his loss. He too cried a tear of sorrow that hardened and clacked away across the cavern floor like a shiny pebble.

  It wasn’t long after his mother’s death that her soft voice magically filled his ears. It urged him to go out and hunt for a meal. Feed to grow. Grow to survive. The voice told him. Ravenous with hunger, and with no knowledge of what lay beyond the protective walls of the cavern, he eventually summoned the strength of will to leave his mother’s side and do just that.

  He screeched out in frustration as he started from the nest to find himself a meal. He was humming the melody to the song of magic as he made his way through the cavern entrance toward the bright and scary light. Crimzathrion didn’t know it, but as he stepped into the first sunlight he’d ever known, he was also leaving behind the horrible run of bad luck that the Gods had thrust upon him, for he wasn’t alone now.

  Far across the valley, a lone traveler, strawberry haired and clad in leather hunting attire, heard the hatchling’s long, anguished wails. She was coming as fast as she could to investigate.

  Clover Shareon was lucky, to say the least. Some said she was the luckiest human alive. She hadn’t the slightest idea what luck really was, but luck was with her this day, as it always seemed to be. She was a third-rate swordsman and a second-rate archer, but a first rate hunter. She knew by heart nearly every peak and valley of this treacherous mountain range. She hunted here for the skins and meat she sold to earn her way. Miraculously, she managed to survive peril after peril over the dozen years she’d been coming here.

  Once, the sudden and highly improbable fall of some loose rock and built up ice saved her from being dinner for a pack of hungry snow cats. A deflected fist she once threw at an angry campsite gambler caused her to stumble just out of the way of a surely lethal bolt loosed by the sore loser’s friend. She’d been barred from all of the wager houses in the nearby towns because she won too much and far too often. In a battle with road bandits, she’d taken a sword clean through the middle of her belly and survived with only the two scars the blade left on her skin.

  Once she fell through a hole in the ice. That was probably the luckiest thing that ever happened to her. She fell only moments before the sleeping wind gusted and sent a massive ridge of loose ice and snow avalanching down into the valley where she was traveling. The hole she fell into turned out to be a tunnel-like shaft that led to an underground cavern. The cave had glowing patches of moss on the walls, illuminating the area well enough to see. There was a spring-fed stream that pooled up in the middle of the bowl-shaped floor. In the pool, schools of eyeless albino fish swam lazily against the mild current. The pool not only provided her with sustenance on her long wait for spring to come and melt away the snow piled above her, but its warm water kept the cavern relatively cozy.

  The wailing Clover was hearing now ended suddenly, bringing her back into the moment. She stopped and looked at her surroundings. She was so eager and curious to find the origin of the long, harrowing calls that she lost track of where she was. After a brief moment of panic, she located a familiar peak in the distance and chided herself for her foolishness.

  Clover hoped it was a wounded snow cat. Rare and beautiful, their thick, silvery pelts were worth more than she could make in a year guiding traders through the mountains or hunting antelope. Their screeching cries were common enough, but Clover wasn’t sure if what she was hearing was a snow cat. The snow cat cries she heard in the past were lower in pitch and more constant. What she heard for the past two days was urgent and higher in tone. It sounded more pain-filled. Snow cat or not, she had to lay her own eyes on whatever it was that sounded so pitiful.

  She started toward the sound twice and ended up going in the wrong direction, but both times she was forced back onto the right track by natural obstacles that somehow seemed to help her along the way. Now she was frustrated because the horrible sounds had stopped completely, and she wasn’t sure which way to go to continue her search. True to form, luck was with her this day. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glinting reflection of scarlet in some trees below her in the valley bottom. She crouched to get a better look, trying not
to be seen by the unknown creature. She was disappointed when a mid-size hopper shot out of the undergrowth she was focused on. She laughed, knowing that the melting snow this late in the spring sometimes reflected in crazy colors, but her instincts told her there was something else down there. Some small predator was probably chasing the hopper, or a bigger beast might just be passing through the hopper’s territory.

  She turned away from the trees below her to look back up the mountain and was stung on the cheek by some tiny insect. As she slapped the pest away, she spun herself back toward the valley and nearly cried out in amazement at what she saw. It was a dragon—a small, red one. It wasn’t much bigger than her in body size, though it was longer. It was trying to catch the hopper, clumsily grabbing with its fore claws, while trying in vain to use its small, undeveloped wings to lift itself into flight. Clover felt sorry for the inexperienced hunter, and silently put an arrow to the string of her old bow. She watched until she had a clear shot at the hopper. The young dragon didn’t even notice the shaft as it struck his prey and pinned it to the ground. He was too busy pouncing to tear a piece of the long-awaited flesh from it. Clover watched in awe and amazement as the little red wyrm ate its meal.

  She wondered suddenly where its mother might be. The huge fire wyrm that sometimes ventured out of the peaks to badger the humans was notorious. She nearly dislocated her neck scanning the skies around her, but the wailing call she’d been hearing the last two days sounded out again from below. It told her on some completely feminine level that no dragon was going to answer the call.

  The little dragon’s mouth was pink and bloody from the meal, but it was still hungry. It filled the valley with the sound of pain and sorrow. Clover understood that this young dragon was alone—either lost or abandoned—left to fend for itself without the benefit of a mother’s nurturing guidance. The sound of the dragon’s screeching forced a tear from Clover’s eye. She knew in her heart that the little beast had no one in the world and it probably wouldn’t survive without help. Clover was careful not to spook the rare, magical young creature as she followed it back up the other side of the valley into a large cavern opening. As she eased into the eerie cave, the stink of death filled her nostrils. It took a while, but she held down her gorge and made her way deeper into the tunnel. Clover’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, but they were watering from the fog of rot that hung in the air. When the passage finally opened up into a cavern, she made out a huge mass that nearly filled the place. She had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming in utter terror. Even a weeklong-dead dragon looked horribly scary. Clover found herself trembling as she took in the massive corpse.

  Gray, milky eyes the size of wagon wheels, slitted with sword-like pupils, stared out lifelessly. A huge curl of pink tongue split a row of yellowed fangs as big around and as long as Clover’s legs. The dead dragon’s nostrils were big enough to crawl into and explore. They were like black holes in front of her. It didn’t take long for Clover to spot the cleanly-picked skeletal carcasses of the huge red dragon’s killers. They were probably all the little wailing hatchling had eaten before the hopper.

  Clover crept back out of the cavern and climbed up on a shelf of rock overlooking the valley below the entrance to the little red’s nest. There she set up a well-camouflaged camp. After overcoming her nausea, she ate a thin meal of dried beef and hard bread. Then she started out to hunt some more sustenance for herself and the little dragon.

  ***

  Throughout the spring, Clover secretly hunted for her ever hungry, continually growing friend. Each day, she took the time to make the meat harder to find, and if she could, a little larger portion than the day before. By midsummer, the dragon was easily twenty paces long from nose to tail. Though he still wasn’t able to lift his growing body with his wings, he could now unfurl them. The dragon could also follow a lengthy blood trail. He started using his hot, fiery breath to char his meat before he ate it, too.

  Each day Clover placed something of hers close to the dragon’s meals. Her hope was that the dragon would become familiar with her scent. Several times she wanted to approach the creature, but her fear got the better of her. Each day after the dragon would feed, it would sniff around her offering, then return to the now grotesquely pungent nest cave.

  One day toward summer’s end, Clover came upon a doe elk that had stepped between two fallen logs and broken its foreleg. Clover decided that the dragon was ready to take its first prey for itself. She used a ragged coil of rope to lasso the wounded elk, and with much effort, she pulled the baying and bucking creature over the ridge down into the valley. She felt sad for the elk, knowing that she was leading it to a certain death. It was a wounded and defenseless creature and that weighed upon her. She steeled herself, though. She knew the elk was sure to die in its crippled condition, and she knew the dragon had to learn to hunt and kill on its own. Nature was like that, she reasoned. She told herself she was just helping the inevitable along. She ended up getting the elk well within scent range of the cave opening and then cut the old rope loose. If it could have, the elk would have bolted away in a heartbeat, but its leg was now mangled and useless from fighting Clover’s makeshift leash.

  Clover said a prayer to the Green Mother for the elk, asking for a quick death for it, as well as for its life to be taken for the good of another. Then she found a good vantage point to watch it all happen and got comfortable.

  The young dragon found the elk’s scent within minutes, which wasn’t easy over the smell of his mother’s rotting carcass. He cautiously approached the big elk, moving slowly and sinuously toward the terrified creature. The elk smelled the dragon now and its eyes were rolling and white, full of instinctive panic, yet it stood there like a statue, quivering as the dragon closed in. Then, like a flash, the dragon leapt from the undergrowth and split the elk’s neck with a swat of its razor-sharp foreclaw. The wyrm reared back his head and roared out deeply as the smell of fresh blood filled his nostrils and the rush of the kill began to course through his veins.

  Crimzathrion took his time cooking and consuming the elk, and more than once he stopped to glance up directly at Clover, but never for long. The fresh meat kept calling him back. Well into evening, the dragon finally finished devouring its first real prey. When he was done, he shook his shiny, red-scaled body, stretched his long, bony spine from neck to tail, then spread his leathery wings wide. After a short, prideful roar, he took a number of long, leaping strides across the clearing and stopped. Several times he did this, each time using his wings a little more effectively. Finally, as the sun was beginning to set, the dragon reared back his head and roared again, this time sending a blast of smoke and flame into the air. Crimzathrion took off running. After only four long strides, he leapt into the air and with a sharp thump of his wings, took his first flight.

  Watching this, Clover began to wonder if the dragon needed her anymore. Now that the dragon was able to fly, it would be able to swoop down on its prey like a hawk. The chore of hunting its own food would be easy. She had been yearning to approach the creature and maybe even touch its slick, shiny scales. She heard some dragons could even speak, but figured since this dragon didn’t have a mother to teach it, that it probably couldn’t. She cursed herself a fool for not approaching it early on while it was still small and timid. Now the dragon was big enough that it could easily kill her if it decided to.

  Regretfully, she decided she would make her way back to her camp and pack up so she could move on in the morning. Her friends and family down in town would be missing her, and all of the fools at the Golden Gargoyle Inn would want to drink themselves stupid and listen to her tales. They’d drink toast after toast to her unbelievable luck, and buy her rounds until the barkeep threw them out.

  She was lost in thought, staring aimlessly down into the now moonlit valley, when a loud Thrump…Thrump…Thrump from not so far behind and above her split the night. The sound sent her heart hammering through her chest. She spun around, reaching instinctiv
ely for her sword. It wasn’t there. She remembered she hadn’t been carrying it lately. The realization came far too late, for there before her was the dragon, raising his sizable, horned head slowly up to his full, erect height. A long period of dead silence followed. Clover was awed and terrified, but no more than the dragon was. Both were tentative, each taking in the other, until Clover remembered to breathe. As she did, the dragon also sucked in a deep noisy breath of air. Clover held her breath again, half anticipating a blast of flame to shoot forth from the dragon’s maw and fry her in her boots, but it never came.

  The dragon was trying desperately to find the spell his mother cleverly instilled in his mind that would allow him to speak in the human tongue. He had sensed Clover’s presence often. After months of filling his belly on her kills, he knew the human was aiding him. For this he was grateful. He wanted very badly to express his gratitude.

  Clover eventually read the curious look in the dragon’s eyes and relaxed slightly. She tried to breathe normally but it was useless. Her body was trembling with exhilaration and she was more than just a little bit scared.

  “Thank you Green Mother,” Clover mouthed to the heavens, but her voice was loud enough for the dragon’s keen ears to hear.

  The words brought the spell that the dragon was searching for instantly to mind and without thinking he spoke.

  “Iss couldss eatss youss,” he hissed awkwardly. “Butss yourss kindss tastess bitterss to myss tounge.” The dragon then reared his head back, belched out a roiling puff of gray smoke, and made a growling, hacking sound that Clover hoped was some form of laughter.

  “Would you bite the hand that feeds you?” Clover asked nervously.

  Again the dragon growled and hacked and blew forth smoke. Clover was relieved. This time the corners of the dragon’s toothy mouth curled upward and Clover was sure that the expression was one of mirth, not malice.