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He nosed her over the edge of the precipice and looked once more down on her. His eyes crinkled, and he no longer looked fearsome and angry.
Love. Wistala’d seen it before when he gazed at Mother as she slept.
“Thank you for the coins, Tala.”
With that, he turned. She saw his tail whip briefly overhead, its bronze catching the last of the setting sun. She heard him growl something to Bartleghaff, but couldn’t catch it over the churn beneath.
No. She’d climbed up and escaped before. She wouldn’t climb down this time. Not even the pain in her dog-bitten sii could stop her.
She slipped over the lip of the cliff and wormed between two pieces of fallen masonry. From the crack, she watched Father advance down the ridge of the narrow peninsula, choosing a rocky outcropping difficult to approach.
Dogs ran toward him in a mass of limbs and white-rimmed eyes and teeth. Behind the dogs, a file of men approached, led by a tall, broad figure in black armor. He was carrying a spear in one hand and a great sword in the other, helm with wings reaching up and almost touching above his crown.
The Dragonblade?
As the dogs approached, Father roared:
Foe and friend ’tween cave and sky
All hear me now before I die
Fire and blood this night will see
When filial vengeance I take of thee!
If any of the assassins understood his death song, they showed no sign of it.
Father ignored the dogs as they swarmed around him, leaping to reach his joints and claws. Barbed shafts flew from the archers and broke against his crest and scales. Father sent a great jet of fire up and across the crest of the peninsula, striking man and pine woods beyond. As the trees exploded into flame, she heard men’s voices cry out. Wistala saw flaming figures fall down the steep sides of the pathway.
The dogs—all alike and bearing the same painted design on their sides as the old one she’d killed by the bank—jumped and bit and hung from Father’s belly and limbs, planting their feet and pulling, arching their backs as they tugged at his flesh. Father was screaming in pain and turned into a whirlwind, biting and lashing at the dogs with his claws. But there were so many, and new slavering beasts jumped up to take the place of each one he killed.
The man in the black armor advanced, raising his spear. It sparked and flashed like distant lightning, lighting his armor and throwing shadows all around.
A hot lump burned in Wistala’s breast. Father couldn’t kill the Dragonblade with dogs pulling at him from every direction. She dragon-dashed forward, squeaking out a roar.
She’d never smelled such a thick blood odor in her life, if anything made sharper by the oily smell of burning dragonflame.
Mad-eyed dogs came at her, and she recoiled, but as her head came up, muscles in her breast took over, and she spat. A thin jet of flame arced out at the dogs, but they jumped aside or over the pathetic puddle of flame.
The dogs, moving so fast they seemed shadow rather than flesh, piled on her.
A white-tipped spear erupted from Father’s neck, and he turned mouth wide and roaring at the black-armored figure who stood atop a rock, silhouetted against the burning trees behind. Arrows that glowed as they flew struck Father all about the neck and jaw and burned there.
Wistala staggered forward, feeling the dogs pull at her. She spat the last of her flame at dog haunches clustered at Father’s back leg and pulling him over, and was rewarded by agonized yelping above the snarls of the three dogs dragging at her.
Father rolled, crushing the dogs, sending others spinning off into the darkness, the spear lodged in his throat like a great bone. The Dragonblade leaped forward and slashed at Father’s belly, opening a wound fully the length of Wistala.
Other men stood at some kind of machine on the peninsula. It sent an oversize arrow into Father’s side, punching through scale as easily as her claw-tip could go through a leaf.
“Father!” she cried.
The Dragonblade ducked under Father’s bite and swept up with his sword. Father’s head and neck crashed down, almost severed.
Wistala forgot the pain, forgot the dogs trying to pull her limb from limb.
She looked into Father’s eyes as the battle fire faded and they went dry and glassy. AuRel, Bronze of the Line of AuNor, had joined Mother in the stars above.
Wistala wailed out her pain to the sky.
