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Hearts pounding, there was nothing to do but cross. She fixed her eyes on Ayafeeia and dragon-dashed across. She felt a thump on her left saa and slipped for one awful second. An iron hook rose, dragged across her fringe, but luckily didn’t catch and fell off into darkness.
Wistala wondered what she would have fallen into if that hook had pulled her down.
But she finished crossing.
She hurried to the others, grouping so as to fill the Star Tunnel wall-to-wall.
“You’re hurt,” Ayafeeia said.
Wistala saw a gash in her saa, and wondered what had made it. It looked like an ax blade that left a ragged end to the wound. She was bleeding, badly. Blood coated her saa and was already pooling, though she’d just planted her foot.
“Tuck it tight, tight as you can. That will slow the flow,” Ayafeeia advised.
The last of the drakka dashed back from the edge of the chasm. “Many hundreds, Maidmother! Coming up each side.”
“We should run,” a dragonelle said. “This is not good ground, too wide.”
“Wistala can’t run.”
“Too bad for her,” Takea said.
“How do we live, Firemaids?” Ayafeeia asked loudly.
“Together!” they responded.
“How do we fight?”
“Together!”
“Then how should we die?”
“Together!”
Now they could hear breathing from the darkness around the break in the tunnel. A shadowy mass of movement, like some mass of seaweed thrown up by a nighttime surf, resolved into individual shapes.
They came, limping, pairs of demen supporting each other, a larger deman dragging a smaller evidently unable to walk.
They all shared one attribute: bright, dry eyes. Wistala would never forget them, bobbing in their reflected light, hundreds of pairs of fireflies, each in its own dance.
“Drakka! Skirmish line, single length!” Ayafeeia called.
A dragonelle on the other side of the column tossed demen this way and that, stomping and swinging her tail. She saw one knocked off into darkness by a tail swipe. A wet splat sounded out of the shadow.
The drakka dashed ahead and fell into line with admirable speed, as though the only thing that mattered in their young lives was getting noses into line, the space of a fully extended tail between them.
She could hear the steps of the demen horde now, a sound walking through spur-deep leaves to faint claw-taps.
“Drakka! Loose flame!” Ayafeeia bellowed.
Orange gouts of flame struck the foremost.
“Drakka! Protect the rear. Firemaids, scale wall, three across!”
As the drakka dragon-dashed to the rear, the remaining six dragonelles dropped into a strange back-to-front set of interlocking pairs. The three biggest dragonelles plopped their backsides down, hugging ground, tails pointed toward the enemy. They swung their tails back and forth, not in unison, but at random. The backward-facing dragons watched flanks and rear, the forward-facing dragonelles held their breath as the demen surged through their burning, fallen comrades. The flames showed the approaching forms admirably.
The other three dragonelles filled the spaces, sii just behind the backwards-facing saa.
Wistala stuck close to Ayafeeia, who kept one eye on the approaching demen and the other on the dragonelle who’d reduced the flanking attack into smears of blood and twitching bodies. She breathed fire into a hole.
