Or did they know something she didn’t?
Wistala looked to the sky, to the late afternoon sun, now disappearing behind a bank of clouds. There’d be a rain tonight, if not a storm. She should nap on the ridge, and then shelter from the storm in one of the caves.
And lose half a day finding Father.
She picked her route down the ridge.
Wistala would have avoided the great claw-shaped cave, for it smelled like bears—but for the sounds wafted up from it. A breeze blew out of the cave. Perhaps it was another chimney from the Lower World, similar to the one she’d climbed with Auron.
As this one didn’t have to travel most of the way up a mountain, the path to the Lower World must be shorter. It conducted sounds, strange rhythms that couldn’t be natural, unless the air was moaning on its way up thousands of individual channels.
She ventured into the cave, found a bone-strewn ingress that had been collecting odds and ends since the forming of the world. But a trio of cracks sent air and sound up from below.
Voices.
She couldn’t pick out individual words, and indeed she could hardly swear that the voices she heard weren’t in her imagination rather than some trick of wind. But the rhythm repeated itself again and again every hundred heartbeats or so.
A song.
No dragon song—that, she’d be able to comprehend. Probably dwarves, singing as they worked or buckled on helm and shield to go kill more hatchlings. This was not a light, glad sound like that of a bird happy to get the morning dew off its feathers; this was a dirge such as a mother dragon might sing over empty, broken eggs. She hoped Father had given the dwarves reason to lament.
Dwarf voices meant dwarf tunnels, chambers, and mines. She must be getting near the tower-girded lake.
And Father.
Sing-song a dragon’s dead!
No more wingwinds, no more dread,
Sing-song, a firestarter’s dead!
The song awoke Wistala from her predawn nap beneath a fallen tree. Some surviving branches still held up part of the bole, and a fresh start emerged from one of the roots—a testament to the resiliency of oaks—and she’d taken shelter beneath it, waking to find fresh spiderwebs all around and the birds cheering.
Wistala’s chest heart shrank to the size of one of the wrapped flies in the web by her nose.
Curse the birds and their tinder-dry nests. “What news?” she called in birdspeech.
“Great news, giant log-turtle,” a grackle chirped. “A dragon’s down by the river-gorge.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Look under the buzzards, then. Already they gather.”
Wistala came out from under the log, and the birds went silent. She heard some tiny frightened peeps.
A tall pine stood nearby. She ran to it, climbed its regular, neatly spaced rungs as high as she dared. She saw mountains and many treetops and butterflies and an overcast pushed up against the snowcaps but—
No. There they are. Oh for my wings, for just one hour’s use of my wings!
She went down the pine recklessly, headfirst, in a series of controlled falls, letting the springy wood and interlaced branches catch her, not caring how the needles stuck or the sap clung to her.
She landed with a thump.
Wistala hurried through the forest, crashing through bramble and sending dead leaves flying, leaving a trail a blind elf could follow by touch. The first hot rush wore off, and she settled into an agonized dogtrot, her breath now louder than her footfalls.
The ground became treacherous and thin soiled, with pines and beeches clinging to strips of earth between rocks flattened and rounded and moss-bitten. She jumped, reached a prominence where she could see through the scattered trees, and corrected her course across blue-green stone with sharp edges that bit her sii.
Dragons aren’t built like horses or wolves, though their legs can get them over short distances at speeds that surprise—and kill—the unwary. They walk over long distances easily, resting tail and head on the ground frequently with weight otherwise divided between their four powerful limbs. But they are poor runners beyond the limits of a dragon-dash.