The Last Dragon Chronicles: Dark Fire (37 page)

“That’s it,” she breathed. “That’s what I need to do.” Her destiny was right here, bottled in her hand. She swung back to face Grockle again. “Take me to the top of the Tor!” She pointed to her chest, then the sky, and  flapped her hands. “I want to go close to the cairn.”

Gwendolen queried the wisdom of this.

“I’m
 
not
 
giving up on Tam,” Lucy said. “He wouldn’t have given up on us. We’regoing to do this, Gwen. We’re going tomake the mirror with my tears and let the

moon reflect in it and… ” she trapped a nervous bubble of air and looked back at

the restless Tor, “… we’ll have a better chance of finding him once the dragon’s free.”

Miaow
. For the first time in Grockle’s

presence, Bella made herself known. She stepped out from the shelter of an ornamental mushroom and sat down in

plain view of the dragon. Her canny gaze swept towards the vial of tears and Lucy wondered, yet again, if the cat could be trusted. Maybe Bella had her own agenda? Maybe she had come to ‘claim the dragon’? Grockle, too, seemed equally chary. His keen olfactory sensors had noted the existence of a warm-blooded

animal at ground level near to Lucy, but

he’d assumed it would be nothing but a harmless   feral   creature.   Bella’s

swaggering arrival made him reconsider. Once again, his nostrils prepared for a strike.

Lucy raised her hand. “No, she’s myfriend. You protect her as well.”
 
For now
,she thought. She put the vial deliberatelyinto her pocket, making sure that Bellaknew that her trust was under scrutiny.

Grockle gave the cat an extended glare.

He   growled  but  appeared  to  haveunderstood.   Leaning  forward,  almostkneeling, he rested one paw on the groundnext to Lucy.

“I’m supposed to climb on?” sheasked. Not quite the romantic carriageshe’d hoped for. In the films, the princess

always rode on the dragon’s shoulder. But laying vanity aside, she pressed herself into the contours of his ‘hand’, wincing as his claws closed around her in a cradle.

The smell of them almost made her heave.

In the quick between toe and claw wereremnants of dried blood and rotting meat. It made her wonder how dragons had evercome to suffer persecution.

With a whoosh, Grockle extended hiswings, making shadow kites on thetrembling  ground.   Lucy  clicked  herfingers. “Bella, come on.” The catswished her tail and bolted up. In oneleap, she bounced off Lucy’s thigh andsettled herself in the crib of the girl’sarms. Gwendolen, a little more sedately,opted for a pocket of Lucy’s coat.

I will not squeal. I will not be sick
, Lucy told herself, though she nearlycommitted both in the first three seconds

after takeoff. They were above the house in half that time, looking down on a vast depression of splintered timbers and broken   roof   slates.   Surprisingly

comfortable   in  Grockle’s   grip,   and

shielded from the wind  by his skilful use of air-deflecting scales, she was able to view her surroundings with ease. She was praying that she might see a lonely figure staggering around the base of Glissington Tor. But though there were cracks in the grassy strata in the area nearest the rear of the guesthouse, there was nothing human moving among them.

Grockle banked and the ground rushed

away in a blur. Up they climbed, into colder, paler skies until, with a slight breathtaking jolt, Grockle backswept his wings and went into a kind of angelic hover. The next sensation Lucy felt was akin to travelling down in a lift. Lower, lower, until Grockle brought her level with the Glissington cairn. Lucy was impressed. As ‘rides’ went, it beat any fairground hollow. The whole flight had taken less than fifteen seconds.

“Take me nearer,” she said.

He moved her forward, until the ‘eye’ was as close as a basketball hoop. Bella turned her head, chattering in the way that Bonnington often did whenever he was slightly unsure of something. Lucy ignored her and peered into the tear-shaped hole.

There was nothing to see, other than asnippet of the far horizon at the end of along, long carpet of green. She could notfind the moon and that panicked herbriefly, until she remembered that it must,of necessity, be above them and behind.

With more than a hint of nervousness,she repositioned Bella and put her handinto the pocket containing the vial. This,she warned herself, might be the biggestanticlimax of all time. She was no sibyl. She knew not a word of mirror-formingmagicks. All she had was her ancestry –and faith.

“Please work,” she whispered, and drew the stopper.

She had been expecting drama, of course, but nothing of the sort that was

about to follow. As she lifted the vial, Bella immediately slashed at her hand. A fine   trail  of  scarlet  scratch  marks

manifested quickly on Lucy’s wrist. Even before Grockle could react to her scream, the cat had struck again, this time targeting the vial itself. The result was that Lucy let go of both. Bella twisted through the air, righting herself, narrowly avoiding the sweep of Grockle’s tail as he attempted to spear her with his isoscele. She landed, as cats often do, on all fours and ran into the shadows at the base of the cairn, before turning her sequin green eyes to look up. No doubt she was confident of seeing the vial come tumbling down to its destruction after her. But that was not to be. For at the

moment Lucy had pulled the stopper,

Gwendolen had fluttered out to watch the

proceedings. It was a simple task, when Lucy dropped the vial, for Gwendolen to zip down and catch it.

Lucy saw the cat’s face and the fury in it. But what concerned her more was the

added look of fear. She saw Bella’s

frightened eyes suddenly flick sideways. Gwendolen was nearing the cairn.

Bella wailed as though her life depended on it.

“Wait!” Lucy shouted. But Gwendolen, thinking she was saving the day, had flown to the eye and tipped the vial. The glass fell away, shattering on the hard grey stones below, but a droplet of its contents was drawn into the opening. It glittered like a jewel at the absolute centre. And

nothing, Lucy knew, would draw it out.

Suddenly, there was a neon-blue flash. The light made Lucy blink and lose focus. When she was able to see again, a film of shimmering water, as delicate as the surface of a bubble, was stretched right across the eye of the cairn.

“Move me away,” she said to Grockle, though her voice was sombre with uncertainty. As Gwendolen returned and settled in her pocket, Lucy looked for a final time at Bella. The cat was transfixed, staring at the moon. It was in position over Scuffenbury Hill.

Lucy ordered Grockle to take her there and set her down close to the white horse

carving. The flight took less than thirty seconds. She had barely put one foot on

the slope when the mirror across the Vale began to  shimmer erratically and a burst of silver light was drawn down from the moon and redirected onto the hill. It hit the

horse precisely where Rupert Steiner had predicted it would, at the point on its head where the horn grew out.

Lucy gasped and stood back a pace. The beams of light were done with in an instant, but on the hillside the chalky figure was ablaze. Any normal fire would have left Lucy baked. But this was like the fire that David had written about. The

blue-white fire that melted no ice. ‘The

fire of creation’ he sometimes called it.

And it was powerfully at work on the hill. As it raged, the flames leapt up and froze,each one changing to a solid strand of

flesh. Layer upon layer, thread upon thread, until they had formed the shape of a unicorn.

For a moment or two, there wasabsolute   stillness.   The   Vale   of

Scuffenbury waited in silence. Then witha tremendous snort of air the creature

bucked its hind legs and scrambled to its feet. It tossed a mane that still retained

sparks of white fire and opened its eyes. They were pure violet.

A soft breeze played around Lucy’s face, picking up a few loose strands of her hair. In an instant, the unicorn had her scent. “Stop!” Lucy shouted, sensing it would run. But it turned and fled so fast

that a ghost trail of  replicates was left in its wake. There was nothing between Lucy

and the legend now but an ordinary,

windswept grassy hill.

But the unicorn had not deserted the

hill. It was Grockle who saw it next, standing on the peak, facing Glissington. He snorted at Lucy, who was just in time to see the creature lower its head and

point its celebrated horn at the Tor. A jagged bolt of white light crackled across the valley and struck the ancient burial mound. The Tor exploded like the shell of an egg, spraying sods of earth in a shuttlecock arrangement back towards Scuffenbury  Hill.   Lucy  yelped   and covered her head, though none of the pieces had the range to reach her. When she looked again, Glissington Tor had broken into four distinct mounds, and

rising from its smoking centre was the most terrifying dragon she had ever seen.

It was green, savage, and at least three times the size of Grockle. When it threw

out its wings it blinded the sun and seemed to draw the landscape around it like a blanket. From nostril to tail it must

have measured half a small field. For a

moment or two it kept its head folded into its chest, but when it raised its snout and Lucy saw the redness in one eye, the bones at the base of her spine turned to jelly. The dragon had been horribly attacked   at  some   time.   Or   maybe

something had failed  with its fire tear? Or the eye had become diseased in some way? She couldn’t tell. Nor could she bear to look at it for long. But little did

she know she would soon be forced to.

For just as the unicorn had sensed herpresence, suddenly the dragon seemed toscent her as well. The scales around its

neck came up in a frill and black smoke gushed from its long, narrow snout. Paying no heed whatsoever to Grockle, it turned its damaged gaze on Lucy. At first she told herself it couldn’t have seen her. She had

to be a mile and a half away, at least. But with a wallop of wings that tickled the blades of grass around her feet, the thing took off and headed their way. In midflight, it uncoupled its jaw and let out a squeal that sounded like a pig being forced through a grinder. Lucy saw c tense. The squeal gathered force and grew into a roar, which seemed loud enough to

shatter the dome of the sky. Lucy covered

her ears and screamed.

The Queen of Dragons was coming for

her.

And she intended to kill.

Wayward Crescent, ten minutes

earlier

“So what brought about the change?” asked David, following Zanna up the stairs to Liz’s room.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I got a shout from Arthur while you were talking to Lucy and went to check Liz out. She’s been mumbling incoherently and her temperature’s up, but nothing out of the normal range for her.”

She swept into the bedroom with David close behind. He immediately sat down and picked up Liz’s hand. Her eyes were still closed. And though it looked from her expression that she was dreaming

again she didn’t appear to be unduly

disturbed.

“Anything? Any words?” David said to

Arthur.

The professor was on the other side ofthe bed. He too had taken hold of one of

Liz’s hands. “Nothing I can make anysense of,” he said.

David frowned and bent close to her

ear. “Liz,” he said in dragontongue, “if you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”

A second passed. Zanna held her breath. The potions dragon, Gretel, flew off Liz’s pillow and positioned herself by David’s knee. Together, they saw Liz’s knuckles lift.

“Yes,” said Zanna, clamping her hands

together in relief. “She responded.”

Gretel raised an eye ridge and whizzedto the bedside table, there to dip her pawinto one of the many small crucibles she’dbeen brewing her concoctions in. Shesettled like a feather on Liz’s chest, thensmeared her patient’s lips with a pale blueliquid. No one questioned what was in thepotion, but it seemed to work. Like a shootbreaking out of its seed, a word passedacross Liz’s lips: “
Lu-cy
.”

Gretel knocked her paws together intriumph. David touched the dragon’s spinein gratitude. He bent towards Liz’s earagain. “Lucy’s fine,” he said (he saw Zanna grit her teeth). “She’ll be heresoon.”

A vein pulsed in the side of Liz’s neck.

She turned her head to one side, nestling

into Arthur’s outstretched hand. The

professor rolled his eyes across the bed towards David. Despite silence and blindness his message was clear.
 
Is this true?

David patted Arthur’s shoulder andmotioned Zanna to the door. “I need to talk