Dragon's Egg (9 page)

“Alain! What—”

“No, not Alain. He's…well…”

“He's what?”

Roger shrugged, looking almost embarrassed. “I—um. Hit him. With a rock.”

“You did?” Roger nodded.

“What about Gwyn? Is he—”

“Later. I'll tell you later. Come
on
, Mella. We have to get away from here.” He was tugging her downstream, toward the ravine.

“We—what?” Mella clutched the Egg close, almost as if Roger had made a move to take it from her. “Leave? You want to leave?”

“Well—what else?”

“We
can't
leave.” Her anger was as warming
as the Egg, and she pulled away from Roger. “We've been trying to get here for days! We're closer than ever!”

“Mella, look. It's a cliff!” Roger gestured at the waterfall, the wall of rock. “We can't climb it. What do you want us to do?”

“I won't leave!” Mella heard her voice in her own ears. She sounded much younger than she was. She wouldn't cry; she wouldn't do it. Furiously she turned her back on Roger and, simply because he wanted to go downstream, she began scrambling up. A series of flat stones, almost like steps, brought her up to the level of the first pool. “You do what you want,” she flung back over her shoulder at Roger, who followed her, protesting. “The Egg's mine. I have to take care of it. You can slink off downstream like a—like a—” She couldn't find a word to finish the insult, but Roger very likely couldn't hear her anyway.

As usual, it was hopeless trying to pick a fight with Roger. When they stood again at the level
of the first pool, at the foot of the thundering waterfall, he touched her shoulder very lightly and gently. “Mella.” He had to get his mouth very close to her ear to speak so quietly and still be heard over the din of the water. “We'll find another way. But there's nothing to help us here.”

Mella pointed a trembling finger.

“There's that,” she said.

W
hat Mella had noticed was a crack in the cliff face. A thin black gap in the stone ran from the height of her shoulder to her knee. It was something she never would have seen from the other side of the river.

But now that she was standing before it, she could see that it was too narrow to let her climb through. Frustrated, she grabbed at the stones, leaning forward and trying to peer into the sooty blackness. Something shifted under her hands.

“Mella, look at this.”

Mella pushed. A chunk of stone gave way and fell, clattering into the darkness inside.

“We can get in. We can, if we try. Roger—”

“Mella,
look
.”

Roger's hand seized her shoulder and pulled her back. Mella boiled with impatience. What was he
doing
? That crack in the cliff seemed to tug at her. Perhaps it led nowhere. Perhaps it was only a few yards deep. But it was a chance, a chance that the dragon had not given them hopeless directions after all, a chance that they did not have to creep away defeated to hide in the woods, carrying the Egg with them.

And now Roger wanted her to
look
? At what?

“Don't you see?”

And Mella did see.

There was a faint outline in the rock, the shape of an arch. Her crack was along one edge. Mella had seen things like this before, in old stone buildings that had changed over time, where someone had blocked up a window or walled up a door. You could never hide the original opening completely.

She wasn't looking at the mouth of a natural cave. She was looking at a door, filled up with stone and mortar long ago. Long enough for
mortar to dry and crack, for stones to fall.

A door in a mountain? Why?

Then Roger's hand swung her around, forcing her to look across the pool. At first she didn't see what he was pointing at. Through a stand of trees across a bare, stony plain, she caught a glimpse of movement. People, many of them. Light flashed on something as shiny as polished metal. Something red and yellow flapped like a curtain in the wind.

Mella darted forward again, pushing at the rocks. She shoved one inside, and more fell with it, tumbling into the darkness. The crack was almost big enough now for her to squeeze through.

Roger was at her shoulder, clutching branches and a handful of dried moss for tinder. He pushed frantically at another big block of stone in the cliff face, loosening it until it fell inward with a crash. They scrambled through the gap they had made. “Here.” Roger, beside Mella, scrabbled at his feet for the fallen rocks. “Hurry.”

Together, they pushed heavy blocks of stones
back into place in the wall behind them, blocking up the hole. “Who are those people?” Mella gasped as she shoved one into place.

“Does it…matter?” Roger panted, balancing a stone on top of hers. “Here—the last one—help me—”

They pushed the final block of stone into place above their heads. Mella expected thick darkness to close around them as they did so. But there was still light from somewhere, faint but enough to reveal rough stone walls and an arched ceiling overhead. They were in a tunnel, perhaps fifteen feet long, and the light came from the other end.

As Mella reached the end of the tunnel and peered out, empty space seemed to swoop in from either side. It took her a moment to realize that the dim, shadowless light came through holes in the wall above the tunnel's opening, holes that must be connected to shafts leading to the cliff face.

The room before her was far bigger than the common room of the Inn, and the ceiling drifted off into emptiness. Dust lay inches thick on the floor. There had been long tables in the center of
the room; most were broken now, their legs disintegrated, their tops canted awkwardly on the floor. One still stood; on it was a tangled contraption of rusted metal and broken glass. Along one wall, a set of tall shelves had rotted and broken, and their contents had slid to the floor, a jumbled heap of shattered pottery, shards of glass, odd pieces of metal—that might have been a knife, that perhaps a many-armed candlestick—all hidden beneath a coating of dust and cobwebs like ghostly, gray white fur.

“What
is
this place?” Roger breathed, turning slowly around.

Mella couldn't answer him. Along the wall to her left, there were what looked like a row of small pens, closed in by waist-high stone walls. She'd seen walls just like that behind Gwyn's home. Walls for holding animals like sheep…or dragons.

Leaving Roger wandering off in the other direction, Mella came to lean against one of the low stone walls and peer into the pen. In one
corner was a heap of stones and gravel. And on top of that was a pile of old bones.

Mella's feet crunched on something hard but fragile. She knelt to run her hands beneath the dust and found herself holding dragon scales.

Her stomach quivered as she stared at the bones on the stone nest. Had whoever walled up that doorway left dragons in here to die? What keeper would have left dragons behind?

“Someone was raising dragons here,” she said to Roger.

No one answered her.

Turning back, she glimpsed Roger across the room from her, studying something in the far wall. She walked toward him, past the arched doorway to the tunnel, past a fireplace so big she could have stood up easily inside it, ashes still heaped in its corners. Her feet scuffed through the dust on the hearth, and she sneezed and looked down, blinking to clear her eyes. The stone floor was scorched and blackened, as if the fire had raged out of control. With her toe, she nudged something beneath the
dust—a heavy iron ring, attached to a rusted chain driven into the wall.

For no reason she could name, a shudder rippled along the skin of her scalp and neck.

“Dragons,” she told Roger as she came up behind him. “I think someone was breeding dragons here.”

“I think so, too. Look.”

Cut into the wall where Roger was standing there was another arched doorway. This one had not been blocked up. But Roger was not pointing at the doorway or the passageway beyond it, where a few steps were visible before the staircase faded upward into darkness.

Water had dripped from cracks in the rock face, trickling down the wall to collect in a pool at the doorway's threshold. Beneath the clear water, a symbol glimmered, silvery metal inlaid in stone.

Mella looked at it blankly.

“Doesn't it look like anything to you?” Roger asked.

“Two triangles and a wavy line?”

“Well, yes. Yes. But…”

Mella looked at the pool again. The symbol wavered slightly as the water rippled.

“It's what the dragon told us to watch for,” she said.

“It's what?”

“The triangles. Like mountain peaks,” she explained, sketching two sharp points in the air with her hand. “And the wavy line, that could be a river. Or a waterfall.”

“It could.” Roger peered at the symbol, fascinated. “I didn't think of that.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“They're signs. Old ones, older than written language. The Defenders have some very old books and scrolls, so I learned the signs to be able to read them. That triangle on the left is fire. The one with the line through it is air. Sometimes it means flight.”

“And the wavy line?”

“Well…it could be water. Like you said. But with the fork at the end—it means serpent. Snake.”

Serpent. Flight. Fire.

“They were breeding something here,” Roger said slowly. “But not farm dragons. And that…”

He pointed to the wall above the doorway. Mella could just make something out, a worn carving in the stone. A crown with three diamonds above it.

“I've seen that before,” she said, puzzled.

“Of course you have.” Roger dug a hand in the purse at his belt and pulled something out, a silver coin. “Look here.”

On one side, a profile of King Astor. Mella had seen him only once, when his older brother died in battle, leaving him the crown. He'd gone on a progress through his new kingdom, and Mella's father had held her up as the royal procession passed, so that she could see her king.

Roger turned the coin over in his fingers. On
the other side, worn smooth with age and handling, was the crown and three diamonds. The royal family's coat of arms. Each king from Coel on downward had claimed it for his own.

“Coel's sign,” Roger said quietly.

Mella shook her head.

“You said it yourself. Coel made the dragons and set them free.”

“No.” Mella shook her head again. “It's just a rhyme. A game song. It doesn't mean—”

“Are you sure?”

“It doesn't
matter
.” Mella shook her head to put away these thoughts. Signs and symbols and children's songs, old coats of arms and people who, too long ago to count the years, had built a bridge and made a stone staircase and carved a cave out of a mountain only to wall it up again, leaving dragons inside to die. It was all a puzzle and a mystery, and she didn't have time for it. “Let's go. Come on.”

“Up
there
?”

“Where else? We need to go up, don't we?”

“Wait. Mella, wait a minute—”

“Wait?” She turned back in frustration. “For what?”

Roger knelt to gather up the branches he'd dropped at his feet and pulled the dried moss out of the pouch at his belt, where he'd put it to keep it dry. “For light,” he said simply. “Not much use trying to climb up a mountain in the dark.”

R
oger ripped a long strip from the bottom of his shirt, wrapped it around the end of a knobby branch, then struck a spark into his tinder and coaxed the flame onto his makeshift torch. Mella, meanwhile, took her wet cloak from her shoulders and wrapped it around the box with the Egg inside it. She tied the corners together to make a sling and settled it over one shoulder, the knot against her chest and the Egg held securely on her back.

Her hands quivered with impatience while she worked. Roger was taking so
long
to get a light burning. But when he was ready at last, she hesitated on the edge of the pool for a moment with an
odd reluctance to put her feet in the water.

The symbol—serpent, fire, flight—glimmered beneath the surface of the shallow water, almost as if it gave off its own light. Mella had an uneasy feeling that the faint glow might soak through her skin and seep into her bones. But when she waded in at last, after Roger, the water felt nothing more than freshly cold, quickly soaking through her wet shoes.

The walls of the passageway were rough, unfinished, natural rock. The ceiling was so low that the smoke from Roger's torch hung just over their heads. Once this had been only a narrow crack in the cave wall, nothing more than a tunnel. But someone had carved steps into the floor, and though the tunnel twisted and wound and curved through the rock of the mountain, it continued to go steadily upward.

Soon Mella's calves and knees began to ache. And she was hungry. They hadn't eaten since the few bites they'd shared with Gwyn. Warm oatcakes, Mella thought longingly. Fresh, soft white
cheese. Better yet, thick toasted bread with tangy jam, and crisp, salty bacon, and dragon's eggs, light and fluffy and so hot they steamed on your plate….

But they had no food. What they'd had, and it hadn't been much, had been in their packs, which were somewhere back at Gwyn's village. At least she was not cold anymore. Laying a hand against the wall, she found to her surprise that it was warm to the touch. Her hair and clothes dried as they made their way upward.

Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling overhead. Mella found herself thinking almost as hungrily about color as about food. Sunlight on a field of yellow and white daisies. The green ribbons in Lilla's hair. Time itself seemed to have gone blank and gray. How long had they been climbing? Without the sun overhead, it was hard to be sure. Their first torch burned down, and Roger lit the second. Then, ahead of Mella, he stopped and bent down. When he turned, he had something in his hand. Silently he held it out to her. It was a
lantern, its metal frame eaten into lace by rust. Someone must have tossed it aside when its candle burned down.

Roger suggested a rest and jammed the torch into a crack between stairs. They sat with their backs to a pleasantly warm stone wall. Mella began to wonder if it had been a good idea to sit down. Her legs felt rubbery, her head heavy. Getting up again seemed impossible.

Roger pushed something into her hand. She blinked at it in surprise. It was a chunk of white cheese.

“I put some in my purse,” he explained, keeping his voice low. The silence of miles and miles of rock pressed in on them, and it seemed best to be quiet. “Back at the village. Some bread, too.” The cheese was coated with lint and dust from the inside of Roger's purse, and the oatcake had crumbled to bits, but Mella's mouth watered eagerly.

“Maybe we should save some,” she whispered. “For later. We don't know how long this tunnel is.”

Roger shrugged and bit into his own piece of
cheese. “If we're too weak from hunger, we'll never find out. You'd better eat it.”

He was probably right. Mella felt her head clear the moment she swallowed. And she remembered that Roger still owed her an explanation.

“What about Alain?” she demanded. “You said you'd tell me.”

“Oh.” Roger swallowed. “I did tell you. I hit him.”

“With a rock.” Roger nodded. “That's not telling!” In her impatience, Mella forgot about staying quiet. Her voice bounced back oddly from the rock all around. “What
happened
? Honestly, Roger.”

Roger seemed reluctant to talk about it, but under Mella's prodding the story came out. He'd run back through the woods only to find Gwyn, his staff broken at his feet, Alain's sword at his throat. From behind, a well-aimed rock had hit Alain on the back of the skull—and that had been the end of it.

“Really?” Mella beamed. “Good for you.”

Roger gave her an astonished look. “Attacking from behind? With a rock? It wasn't exactly…” His voice trailed away. “I mean, a knight isn't…And if I'd been quicker, Gwyn wouldn't have…He was hurt, you know. A bad cut through his shoulder. That's why he dropped the staff, I suppose. He was bleeding.”

“And you don't like blood.” Mella remembered him saying so. In the smoky orange light from the torch, Roger's face looked thin and pale.

“I bandaged it up. I used pieces from his cloak. I think I stopped the bleeding. But he passed out, all that blood, and then I saw…”

“What?” Why did Mella have to drag this story out of Roger one word at a time?

“You saw them too. I didn't stay to chat. I thought I'd better find you. They were close by. They would have found Alain and Gwyn. And Gwyn can explain, when he wakes up. It would have been…complicated. If I had stayed.”

Just a bit complicated, Mella thought, trying to imagine Roger explaining why he was alone on a
mountain slope with two men, both unconscious, one bleeding.

“So I ran. Like a—” Roger's mouth shaped the word
coward
.

Mella stared at him. “You're an idiot,” she declared.

Roger's head jerked a little, as if she had slapped him. He looked almost indignant.

“What do you know about it? You're a—you don't know. About knights. About the rules. About everything.”

Perhaps it wasn't impossible to pick a fight with Roger after all.

“I know Gwyn would have been dead if you hadn't gone back,” Mella pointed out tartly. “I know there's no point attacking a man with a sword from the front if you don't have one yourself. And Alain, of all people…Honestly, Roger. If you're worrying about being nice to
him
…”

“It's not about being nice,” Roger answered hotly. “It's about being, well…”

“Noble?” Mella finished for him.

His jaw took on a stubborn set. “Yes.”

“Well, then. Isn't it noble to save a life? Isn't it noble not to desert a companion? You had to help Gwyn. The rest is just…” Mella waved an impatient hand. “It doesn't matter
how.
It's nice to have a sword and armor and a banner, I suppose, and to do it all prettily, but don't you think Gwyn is glad you went back, no matter what?”

“You don't understand.” Roger was shaking his head, but he didn't sound angry anymore. A smile was even tugging at one corner of his mouth.

“I do understand,” Mella said with dignity. “I just think you're being stupid.”

Roger actually laughed and, swallowing the last mouthful of dry oatcake, he got to his feet. “Come on,” he said, reaching down to pull her up as well.

They kept climbing, the tunnel growing narrower and the stairs steeper as they went. Once Mella's foot came down on a slab of rock that crumbled as she touched it, and she slid down several feet before she could catch herself. More than once, piles of rocks, fallen from the ceiling,
blocked their way. And once, as Roger climbed over such an obstacle, a light dusting of sand drifted down on his head, and then a few pebbles dropped down around him. He and Mella both froze, holding their breath. But the ceiling held firm.

The second branch Roger had brought burned down. The third. The fourth.

Mella took the fifth torch from Roger's hand and pushed ahead. She didn't want to acknowledge what they both knew—that this was the last one.

She wanted to run, but her legs ached and dragged. The stairs were steeper now, and she had to use her free hand to help herself up.

Mella thought that, if she ever got down to level ground again, she'd never leave it. She'd sleep on the first floor of the Inn. In the kitchen, on the hearth. She'd watch the fire all night, she'd bank it and tend it and clean out the ashes, if only she never had to walk up one more stair.

“Mella. Stop.”

She didn't.

“Mella. The torch is burning down.”

It wasn't.

“Mella. Look. Your hand.”

Her hand had been uncomfortably warm for a while now. She had been ignoring it. But the sharp bite of the fire was suddenly too fierce, and without meaning to she let the torch drop.

The burning brand broke into pieces as it hit the floor. The red coals glowed in the dark and slowly died. Blackness folded in around them. Mella could almost feel it, soft and clinging as cobwebs, brushing against her face. She'd thought the darkness outside, on a moonless night, had been thick. But it had been nothing compared to this.

Roger stumbled against her, grasped her arm.

“Mella? We have to go back.”

Roger was right, of course. How could they grope their way forward in pitch blackness? Ahead of them, the stairs might be broken entirely. Fallen rock might block the passageway. Chasms might have opened up in the floor. They couldn't go on, unable to see where they were putting their feet.

But Mella didn't turn around despite the tugging of Roger's persistent hand. She felt like a fish on a hook, being pulled upstream. If she turned back now, the hook would be torn out of her, and she might die from the wound.

But how could she tell that to Roger? She'd sound mad.

“Mella. Come on.”

“Look.” Mella whispered it.

She might not have seen it if the torch had not gone out: a patch of light, dim with distance, far ahead. It seemed to dance and swim in front of her eyes. She blinked hard. It was still there.

The two of them groped their way toward the light that became steadily brighter and stronger. Soon the stairs flattened out into a gently sloping tunnel, and they ran. When they tumbled out at last into a wide, stony valley, they had to cover their eyes with their hands, shielding their sight from the brilliance of raw sunlight.

At last Mella, blinking away tears, could look up. The valley was no more colorful than the
tunnel, a tumbled wasteland of gray rock. But the blue sky, streaked with creamy white clouds, arched high overhead, and Mella sighed with satisfaction to look at it.

The valley was almost perfectly circular, as if they stood inside an enormous bowl, with a dark lake at its center. The gigantic rock formations scattered around were shaped and sculpted by wind. There was nothing jagged about them, everything rounded and smooth.

“A volcano,” Roger said, gazing raptly around. “An ancient volcano, it must be. Did you feel how warm the rock was when we were coming up?” He laid his hand against the curve of a gray rock that rose above his head. “Here, too. Volcanic…Mella, what is it?”

Mella was looking up, past the walls of the valley. On either side, a pair of matching mountains stood sentinel. Their steep slopes rose to peaks splashed with white.

“The Fangs,” she said shakily. “Roger, look where we are. Between the Fangs.”

Roger followed her gaze. “
This
is the Hatching Ground?”

Mella spun slowly around to take in the whole of the valley. “It must be. Look—”

She had turned back to face the way they had come, and suddenly her words stuck in her throat.

Where was the entrance to the tunnel? They couldn't be more than a few yards away, yet Mella couldn't see it. They were surrounded on all sides by the smooth, round boulders.

“Roger—” Mella's voice came out faintly. She felt a powerful urge to throw herself into a hole and hide. But where? And from what?

She blinked.

That smell—it had been days now since she'd smelled the familiar whiff of sulfur and ashes. And the rock just in front of her was changing color.

A wash of warm, light brown spread across the dull gray stone. But it didn't stay brown. It brightened every moment until it was the bronze of late sunlight, then the yellow of buttercups, then the brilliant gold of newly minted coins.

At the same time, it moved. A wave of rock shifted and stretched, becoming a shoulder. Another rounded like a back haunch. A long, thin, snakelike neck unwound itself, and a crack in the rock opened and widened until Mella was looking into a deep black eye larger than her head.

All around them, the same thing was happening. Rocks that were not rocks, rocks that were hidden dragons, sat up, their wings stretching to the sky, their unfriendly eyes on Mella and Roger.

“Um, Mella,” Roger muttered. “Do you think they—they know? Why we're here?”

The great golden dragon opened her mouth. Her words came out among wisps and curls of steam.

“Trespassers. Humans. This place is forbidden to you.”

Mella's tongue was stuck, her jaw stiff. She'd forgotten—how could she forget?—how
big
the true dragons were. And this one was twice the size of the one she had encountered near the Inn. She shrank back a step, until a puff of steam, hot and
damp on the back of her neck, made her jump forward again.

“They don't
know,
” Roger hissed in her ear.

Well, you tell them!
Mella wanted to snap. But she didn't. It was her place. She was the keeper.

“We're not—” she croaked. Oh, that was terrible. She tried again. “We came here—”

The golden dragon's head snaked closer to Mella. Her nostrils flared and her black eyes widened.

“The Egg,” she growled. Her tail slapped the ground, scattering stones. “I can smell it. What have you—”

“Yes!” Mella burst out. “We brought it, I promised, here, here it is, we…” She yanked at the cloak draped over her shoulder. Her fingers, awkward and clumsy, fumbled with the knots. At last she pushed the rough cloth away and held out the metal box to the dragon. “See, here it—”