Jennifer Scales and the Messenger of Light (7 page)

“There’s a hunt every night,” Jennifer explained. “And it’s not like the way we play with sheep around here. If you like hunting, you’ll love oreams!”

“I’ve heard that,” whispered Catherine, looking furtively about the yard and sky between Grandpa Crawford’s cabin and the nearby lake. “But Jennifer, we’ll get into trouble! You’ll get into trouble!”

“Not if we’re careful. And it’s stupid that it’s a secret, just like you said. You’ll have plenty of places to hide. Crescent Valley is a big place. Really, it’s a whole…well, you’ve got to see it!”

Her friend wavered. “I don’t know…”

“Dad says he once saw ten packs of newolves within a day’s flight.”

“Let’s go.”

She told Catherine they would have to wait another half hour—the autumn sun had barely set, and the crescent moon was barely high enough to cast any light on the water.

“What the heck does that mean?” Catherine asked.

“What the heck does that mean?” Jennifer asked.

“Look down there,” her father told her. The large lake beyond Grandpa Crawford’s cabin was shimmering.

“Okay, so there’s moonlight on the water. Big deal.”

“Not just moonlight. Crescent moonlight.”

“Yeah, okay…?”

“So that means the gateway is open.”

“Gateway? What gateway?”

He sighed. “I guess there’s only one way to tell you, and that’s to show you.” And then he dove, headfirst.

They were at least as high as they had been the first day he had taught her to fly and fish. She wondered what he was up to, and began to follow in a cautious slope.

In a split second she realized this wouldn’t do. She was losing the shape of her father against the play of light and shadow below. Best she could tell, he was gathering speed—he was going to hit the lake too hard!

“You’re going to hit the lake too hard!” Catherine shouted this out from far above, but Jennifer could barely hear her over the whistling of the wind. Her wings were folded in tightly to her body, and her eyes were nearly closed. Even knowing what was coming, she was nervous. Like a gleaming, moonlit bullet, she pierced the surface of the water and was gone.

He was gone! She couldn’t see him in the depths below. It was like swimming through cold ink—all the light was behind them, and even her thick hide was beginning to feel a bit numb as she blew the last of her air out and kept sinking. It was terrifying—and thrilling.

Not only couldn’t she see him, she couldn’t see anything like a fish or plant or the bottom. There was nothing at all, and she was just about to give up on this game and turn back…

…when she saw the faint light ahead.

Yes, the water was getting lighter now, not darker. Had she flipped over somehow? She knew she hadn’t.

After a few moments, she could make out her father’s slim shape against whatever light source was ahead. His wings propelled him as he relaxed and tensed, forcing water over his body. Jennifer decided to try it, too.

It was a great deal faster, she mused, than the claw paddle she had used the first time last spring. And it certainly helped propel her faster through the disorienting swirl of current that greeted her once again. Gravity shifted along her spine until the bottom of the lake was behind her. Neither she nor Catherine had turned at all, but there it was ahead of them—the surface, and the promise of air.

She glanced back briefly to make sure her friend was still following, and then squeezed her wings one final time. The force propelled her up out of the water and right into the moonlight of a different world.

That much was obvious right away. For a start, the moon was the same shape, but was far closer than would ever be possible back home. It was so large and immediate to Jennifer, she was sure she could reach out and touch the lower point of the crescent. The sharp edge slid through the twilit sky, piercing the first bright nighttime stars with a gentle clockwise motion.

The air here was warmer and heavier, as if filled with the lingering breath of ancient things. The scales on the back of Jennifer’s neck crinkled, and her ears flexed. She could hear foreign sounds in the near-darkness around them.

“What are those?” Catherine asked. “They sound like crickets, if crickets could play cellos.”

“Fire hornets,” Jennifer replied. “There are hives of them throughout the forests and mountains near here.”

There was another sound, the tinkling of small streams of water. The delicate sound was amplified on the lake’s surface. Following the trickles with their ears, they spotted small, mantislike shapes skimming the water just below them. The water beetles raced over the ripples the two dragons had made when they emerged.

“And those are the portal’s guardians,” Jennifer explained. “The sound you hear carries up to the moon, and then…”

“Wow.” A streak of fire was igniting a circular path around the moon’s crescent shape. Like a belt of flame, the fire whipped round and round the fattest portion of the crescent several times before it died of its own accord.

“We are recognized,” said her father. She had nearly forgotten he was with her in this strange new world. “The venerables have sent us a signal of welcome.”

“Venerables? Who are they, dragons? Do they know who we are?”

“They’re dragons of a sort,” he answered mysteriously. “They welcome us. Come on, follow me. It’s not far from here to Crescent Valley.” With a curl of his tail he made off for the shore of the lake, keeping the moon to his right.

This lake was much larger than the one they had entered by. It seemed a prelude to the sea. But all Jennifer could tell for sure was that before her and to either side were the sturdy shapes of enormous hills. Their twilit outlines were rough with treetops, and soon Jennifer could make out the whistling of the wind through large branches with many leaves.

“Jennifer, we’ve got to get down to the ground! I can’t keep this up for much longer!”

Startled, Jennifer turned around. Of course—Catherine was a trampler, and her wings were not suited for efficient flying.

“Whomping?” she suggested with a grin.

“Yeah, sure, but will we be able to see down there? It’s already pretty dark!”

“Oh, we’ll be able to see!”

They dipped below the tree line and its thick canopy of leaves, and navigated a network of long and slender branches. Jennifer heard Catherine gasp behind her.

It was still a breathtaking sight—and tinged in violet, different from when Jennifer had last been here.

“What an amazing green!” she exclaimed to her father. “It’s like having an emerald sun all around us!”

The lichen was luminescent, and laced the slender stalks of the ninety-foot trees. Moon elms, her father called them. There were no branches on their trunks until they exploded in the canopy above, ending in green-tinted bursts of large, five-pronged leaves. The dark trunks were unusually thin for their height, suggesting no more than twenty or thirty rings of astounding growth.

They were going downhill now, she could tell. The lichen was getting more frequent. She could see the gathering luminescence ahead. It was as if they were skimming the surface of an enormous bowl, and all the light had pooled at the bottom.

A stomp behind her told her that her friend had begun to turf-whomp—a trampler’s mix of jumping and flying. Here, the ground was sheathed in layers of moss and dead leaves, and the rebound was powerful.

“Whoa!” she heard Catherine yelp as her friend nearly disappeared up into the canopy. “That’s quite a spring in the ground! Have you tried this?”

“Once or twice.” Jennifer grinned. “I slammed into a fire hornet nest. Fire hornets get angry fast. I almost got turned into a gooey, charred mess!”

That got Catherine looking warily about.

“Don’t panic. They’re not in this part of the forest. The strumming you heard over the lake came from the southern shores. We’re headed northwest.”

She vaulted in front of her friend with her own whomp. With a deft shift of her left wing and flick of a hind claw, she pushed down off a nearby tree trunk and propelled herself back toward the turf. Another thump and she was back up again.

Thump. Whomp. Pumph. Like aliens enjoying a planet with low gravity, the two dragons bounded and glided through the eerie violet world.

“How far to Crescent Valley?”

“It’s just ahead, over this hill. Er, since you’re not supposed to be here, you’ll have to hide. Try to stay close, so you can follow us to the hunt.”

“There’ll be newolves on the hunt?”

“Absolutely. You might see them, though I’ve never gotten a really good look. But you’ll definitely hear them.”

“The herd is scattered across the northern slope of Wings Mountain,” Crawford explained. He was speaking to forty-nine other creepers, Jennifer among them. Elsewhere, fifty tramplers and fifty dashers were also making their plans. But this was not for competition. Unlike the sheep “hunts” on the farm, she learned, hunts in Crescent Valley were part of a solemn and coordinated ritual.

“It will begin with the newolves,” he continued, drawing a rough map in the dirt with his claw. “They will drive the herd down off the more difficult terrain and frighten them into a single unit, so that we can get as many of them as possible in our trap. Once they are off the steeper slopes—”

“I don’t get it,” a young male creeper called out. “Why don’t we just pick these things off the slopes, one at a time, whenever we’re hungry? Seems easier.”

Jennifer could see her grandfather tense. “You have just passed your fiftieth morph, son, so I’m going to assume you’ve never seen an oream and that’s why you’re wasting time planning to pick an animal with the horns of a devil and the presence of a mountain goat off a four-foot-wide ridge at an elevation of seven thousand feet!”

If the younger creeper could have shifted his skin to look like thin air, he probably would have, she guessed from his embarrassed expression.

“Once the herd is off the steeper slopes and in the open,” he continued, “Ned and the tramplers will rescatter them across the clearing.”

Jennifer smiled at the mention of Ned Brownfoot, the easygoing elder who had taught her and Catherine how to call lizards.

“That won’t break them down enough, though—their instinct will be to stick in pairs and families at least, for as long as they can. So the dashers will come in and set up a few fireworks.”

Dashers had forked tails that could deliver nasty shocks of sparks in midflight. Jennifer hoped to try that role in a future hunt, but with Catherine hiding nearby, simpler was better.

“That ought to break them up into single units, around the fringes of the field.” He looked up at them all. “That’s where we’ll be waiting, camouflaged, waiting to spring. Our job is the kill. Then we all pull together for the barbeque, so to speak. Any questions?”

There were none. All but four or five of the hunters were experienced and well aware of their role. “Good. Let’s get set up. We need to be in position an hour beforehand, so we don’t spook the herd. Set out in groups of five, and give Wings Mountain a wide berth until you’re around it. You.” He pointed at the young dragon who had interrupted him earlier. “You’re with me. You, too, Niffer.”

Crawford watched all the other groups go before he set out with Jennifer, the young male, and two other creepers. They set out in a diagonal formation, like half of the V a flock of geese might make. Just barely skimming the tops of the moon elms, Jennifer took position just behind and to the right of her grandfather. As they approached a cluster of mountains to the north, he led them sharply to the west so that they would remain a good mile away from the closest one—Wings Mountain, they called it, and its southern slopes were home to most of the dashers in Crescent Valley.

“Grandpa,” she asked as they swept over the trees, “what happened at Pinegrove?”

“What’s that?” His head whipped sharply to look at her, and then craned over a bit to give the young creeper behind her a stern look. “Pinegrove? Niffer, this is hardly the time for a story. In fact, I don’t know that there’s any good time at all for that particular tale.”

“But Catherine said—”

“Catherine Brandfire would do well to keep her mouth shut,” he huffed. “And so would you. Keep your mind on the hunt.”

His gaze returned to the dim stars ahead, and Jennifer cruised behind him with a seething stare. No, this business of secrets did not sit well with her, not at all.

She spared a quick glance behind and below her. Catherine would be whomping far beneath the canopy, following the creepers to the hunt site. From there, the young trampler would find a quiet spot to observe the hunt, and if luck turned out right, newolves.

Fifteen minutes later, Jennifer found herself on the western edge of a massive clearing, rolled up between two raspberry bushes at the edge of the forest and looking rather branchy herself. Grandpa Crawford was about thirty feet north of her, with his reluctant protégé close by. Her leg was already beginning to cramp, but she knew she shouldn’t move if she could help it. At first the oreams were distant points of gray fur high up the mountain, but they were grazing closer now and had excellent eyesight. Across the twilit meadow to the southeast, she thought she could make out the still shapes of the tramplers, but they were hidden by a stiff ridge of rock that thrust up near the foot of the mountain.

Finally, after nursing a cramp in her calf for at least twenty minutes, she heard the newolves.

Four unseen newolves high upon the peak sounded a hunting chord: D major. Crawford had told her that newolves used these chords to inform the dragons how and when they would move a herd, among other things. D major was a standard drive pattern for a scattered herd.

Sure enough, she began to see small, white, fluffy shapes make their way down the lower slopes of Wings Mountain and away from the howls. The earth trembled slightly with the distant pounding of hundreds of hooves, and her nostrils picked up the growing scent of prey.

It took some time, but once the last ranks of the herd gathered at the foot of the mountain and passed into the vast clearing, the tramplers charged.