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They found the troll-cave, a little quarter-moon cut in the rock. DharSii made it through easily enough, but Wistala had to twist to fit. She had always been a muscular dragon-dame, stronger than either of her brothers.
They found the source of the green scale. She was a dragon familiar to Wistala, her own sister removed by mating through RuGaard. Incredibly, it was Yefkoa of the Lavadome, one of the fastest dragonelles Wistala had ever known. She’d pledged herself hearts-and-spirit to the Firemaids and fought in battle after battle.
Wistala couldn’t imagine what kind of catastrophe would take Yefkoa from her sworn sisters. Now she knew: Yefkoa lay pinned by a great boulder across her neck, trapping her on her side in the cave.
Wistala put her spine under the rock, ready to carefully shift it off her former commander in the Firemaids, when DharSii grunted and pointed with his tail.
A horrible sort of leech clung to Yefkoa’s torn-away skin. It was a newborn troll, or at least that’s what Wistala guessed it was. It resembled a full-grown troll about as much as a tadpole resembled a frog. It looked to be in the process of burrowing under her skin.
“What do we do?” Wistala asked.
“Get it out, please,” Yefkoa said. “I think the troll put it there, I thought it was eating me at first. I can feel it moving.”
“Grip it with your teeth, Wistala,” DharSii said.
She did so. Yefkoa screamed in pain.
“It’s tearing into me. Biting!”
“This is going to hurt. Prepare yourself,” DharSii said, extending his sharpest and most delicate sii.
Wistala had to close the eye facing him. She heard more cries from Yefkoa and the splatter of dragon-blood striking the floor of the cavern.
“If I die, there’s a message—” Yefkoa said.
“Go’ eh,” DharSii said through locked teeth. Go ahead.
She heard him spit something out and opened the eye facing him. The troll-tadpole lay on the floor, giving a residual twitch now and then.
“And I thought the smell was bad! I shall never get this out of my mouth,” DharSii said, spitting torfs of flame in an effort to burn out the taste. “They taste like no other flesh.”
“Better in your mouth than my hide,” Yefkoa managed.
“I’d rather eat poison ants,” DharSii said. He kept extending and retracting his tongue. The flapping tongue reminded Wistala of a dirty rug being shaken out by a blighter.
Wistala shifted the rock.
“Thank you,” Yefkoa groaned, able to raise her head.
“Wistala, find some dwarfsbeard for this,” DharSii said. “I believe I saw some on the downed tree where we first saw the troll-tracks. Who knows what kind of filth this thing left in the wound.”
“In a moment. What do you need to tell us, Yefkoa? Why did you come here? What’s happened to the Firemaids?”
“Lavadome. Tearing itself . . . apart. Firemaids . . . broken up. Ayafeeia begs your help . . . and attendance,” Yefkoa managed to say.
Had she gone mad from the pain?
“We can talk later,” DharSii said. “Let’s see to the wound.”
Wistala squeezed herself out of the troll-cave and flew downslope.
She, who as Queen-Consort had once directed the defense of the Lavadome against an invasion, who had held the Red Mountain pass with a handful of Firemaids against the Ironrider hordes, now waged campaigns against trolls and hurried to find dwarfsbeard to patch a painful but minor wound.
The terrible methodology of war, the chaos and life-and-death decision making, the ceremonies over the dead and the praise to the heroic living . . .
She didn’t miss any of it one bit.
She would so much rather be trading philosophy with DharSii after a good dinner, or watching birds go about their clockwork routines, or trying her voice at poetry.
