Wistala let out a challenge, but the battle cry of her dreams came out as a thin peep. It still startled the copper into turning.
It was fast, even with its wounded leg, and didn’t have the wretched umbilical sac slowing and tripping it. She put her head down and butted him as hard as body mass allowed.
At least he left off attacking Jizara.
He opened his mouth, glaring at her from behind rows of teeth, and every instinct told her to retreat. Her back end showed its strange tendency to act of its own accord, and she backpedaled—but she showed her own teeth, giving as good as the copper had done.
He turned his head, grabbed a piece of the carcass’s tail, and ran.
Her feeling of triumph vanished as her gray brother bounded up, coiling and uncoiling his body in a way Wistala envied, covering ground in a run that was more a series of elastic leaps than footwork.
The copper scrambled off the egg shelf, clutching his meal.
Her scaleless brother screeched down at his opponent, long tail lashing back and forth so that it threatened to catch her across the nose. When he returned to the feast, he sniffed at Jizara’s neck—What would she do if the gray male tried to make a meal of Jizara?
Wistala extended her neck—not so long as either of her siblings’—and began to lick her sister’s wound.
ONE
Hatchling
BETTER SEVEN RAGING DRAGONS AS YOUR
ENEMY THAN A SINGLE PATIENT DRAGONELLE.
—Islebreadth
Chapter 1
The cloudscapes and air currents, so pleasant to drift across, darkened. Her glittering green scales turned dull and slag. A vast black mass rolled overhead.
Thunder hit her ears, pounding thunder, relentless, unnaturally regular, pursuing her like hoofbeats.
She tipped her wings, dropped, tried to flee the storm, but the darkness overtook her. The feathery dimpling of the clouds below disappeared, replaced by a wet mist of confusion . . . suffocation. The darkness shot down her nostrils and into her lungs.
Out, out of this weather!
She tried to straighten her neck, form her body into an arrow, to dive out of the storm and take shelter, but her limbs wouldn’t cooperate. She twitched, confused, fighting, unwilling to draw a breath of the storm’s thick air.
Crack!
Am I lightning-struck? she thought.
Then the air came and she breathed, a gasp that infused her with new life, her limbs with strength. The mists faded, except for the booming thunder; she realized the noise in her ears was her own hearts. No clouds, no storm, no choking mists, just cramp and wet and a maddening irritation like insects biting under her scales.
She twisted, stretched, as though each of her four limbs, neck, and tail were in a contest to get farthest away from the others, and then the world gave way—
—and she found herself on her side. Terror struck. My belly is exposed! and she fought to roll. Then her nostrils smelled it, a rich musky scent that set her at ease. Something sharper in the background, blood . . .
Blood! The smell of appetite and danger.
Dimpled, irregular surfaces all around, but hard and dark, quite the opposite of the clouds, an agonized squeaking near her . . .
Come out Wistala, or Auron will have your breakegg meal.
I am Wistala.
She rolled her eye, tried to raise her sii, her tail, but instead of coiling ropes of muscle that could fell young trees, she saw stubby deformities trapped in bits of viscous-sided egg clinging to her like a net. Next to her, another green face, pale-pink fringe rising from her skull-ridge and folded this way and that as it descended along the neck. Her sister had her own problems: a head hardly out of her egg.