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He was wrong.
Starlight’s fangs closed on his tail. Liquid fire flowed into his veins. AuRon slammed his rear feet together on his tail, digging his claws into his own flesh, battling pain with more pain. He struck back, snapping at Starlight’s wing joint. Each dragon held the other’s flesh in a death grip, and both began to fall to earth.
AuRon kicked out with his legs, pulling his own tail off near his haunch. Flesh separated from flesh in a spray of blood. The agony caused him to pull his head up and away from Starlight, taking the wing joint with him.
He flapped free of Starlight.
“You die, you die!” the silver screamed as it let go the tail-meat. AuRon had torn the tip from one wing and destroyed the other. Starlight spun on his one wing, in tight circles, unable to balance in flight. AuRon drifted until he saw Starlight break against a mountainside, tumbling along with the stones he loosened to the rocks below.
“I’m sorry, my brother,” AuRon said. He felt ill with pain and exhaustion, but his legs worked. The poison hadn’t made it into his system before he pulled his tail off. He still feared for himself, he was almost as unbalanced in flight as Starlight, and he began to dive. He shifted his neck this way and that, trying to right himself.
Natasatch was beside him in a flash. “Hold on to my tail! I’ll pull you.”
He bit into her tail, and they flew like joined dragonflies. AuRon worked on shaping his wings so he could get along better without the counterweight of his tail. They landed at a glacial pool, and drank.
“I saw Starlight fall. What happened to your tail?” she said, sniffing at the stump. What was left was no longer than AuRon’s foreleg.
“It seems fate is determined to see me tailless. Better it than my neck, I suppose. Pulling my own head off wouldn’t have worked as well.”
Natasatch licked at the thick sludge coating the wound, prruming to comfort her bleeding mate. “Poor Starlight. I tried to be his friend, once, but he was taken before he hatched. The oafs that raised him made him into a blighter, or worse. The Wyrmmaster channeled his viciousness, but couldn’t subdue it.”
AuRon spat blood and phlegm. “We need food and rest. But I have to see to something first.”
They flew—awkwardly, in AuRon’s case—to the ruins of the Wyrmmaster’s lodge. The piled stones of the foundation still stood, but both stories and part of the roof were gone. The lodge had collapsed in on itself. The smoke of the fire could be smelled from high in the sky above.
A few drakes lurked in the woods, watching the fire. They scuttled for cover when AuRon and Natasatch circled the ruin, the strange sight of a tailless dragon frightened them off at the end of this wild day. AuRon spied Wrimere, sitting in his carven chair, staring out at the fjord. A dragon boat, crammed with people and possession, was pulling away from the isle as a dragon circled above.
“You were the cause of this, they tell me,” the Wyrmmaster said as AuRon landed. Natasatch circled once more overhead, then dropped down beside him.
“I wasn’t the cause of it. I’m the end of it.”
The Wyrmmaster looked as though some cavern inside him had collapsed. His hair streamed in the wind, his thick-featured face even more masklike. He looked at AuRon out of the corners of his eyes.
“I liked you. I liked you from the first. You were a dragon of rare quality. I spoke for you when others warned me against you. I should have known the elves sent you. What will the payoff from the dwarves be, I wonder?”
“An elf bade me come here. You’re right about that. You’re wrong about everything else, though.”
“They’ll kill your kind, if they can. The elves and the dwarves. One by one, you’ll dwindle and die. An alliance with men against them was your last chance.”
“The things you were raising here weren’t real dragons. It was no solution to the dilemma of dragons. Just another problem. If dragons, with all their gifts, are to die, it’ll be the fault of dragons. Not their assassins,” AuRon said.
“When you’re older, when you have eggs of your own, you may think differently. One of the follies of youth is the belief that you shape events. It’s the other way around, and always has been. Now you, AuRon the all-knowing, AuRon the all-powerful, AuRon the ambitious, comes to close the book of my life. A creature as strong as you completes the victory by killing a wobbly old man in his chair.”
“I had hoped—”
“Well, I won’t let you,” the Wyrmmaster said. He pulled a dagger from between his legs, one of the wide-bladed kind used by the Dragonguard. He plunged it into his stomach and snapped off the hilt with a cry. The Wyrmmaster let out sort of a strangled rattle. His body convulsed in the chair, leaving a pair of open eyes sightless to the sun.
Natasatch sniffed at him. “Men are such fools.”
“He was a great man. He just poured his greatness into the wrong river. Let’s be done with this.”
Natasatch spat out her foua. The carven wooden chair burst into flame along with the corpse. The cinders of both mingled as they rose into an annihilating blue sky. The Isle of Ice belonged to the dragons now.
Epilogue
Big as it was, the Isle of Ice and its archipelago surrounding it could not remain the home of all the dragons there when the Wyrmmaster’s men quit. AuRon and Natasatch stayed, as did the brooding trio of dragonelles and those who had hatchlings to care for.
Some, like Shadowcatch, had their own aspirations and left gladly. The black dragon Shadowcatch of the breeding stock lumbered south, where he played no small part in the wars against the armies of the Men of the Golden Circle and their dragons.
