The Dragons of Noor (26 page)

Near the temple ruin, stone spires cast long shadows in the pale, morning light. He followed a single shadow all the way to the pillars where the she-dragon had stopped sometime before dawn. The deep claw prints revealed that she’d paced back and forth before moving on.

Miles looked up. Some pillars in the long row still had roof beams stretching out like branches toward the far side. He imagined a dome spread overhead like a great forest canopy. There was nothing left of it now, but he sensed the dome had once been green, and so had the arid dragonlands. How long ago that must have been.

Dawn painted the clouds tangerine; the sky loomed pale purple. In the nearby bushes, insects began to click. Wind stirred the clouds above, and their twin shadows on the sand moved toward the mountain range.

Circling a pillar, he rested his palm on the cool stone. There were darker circles higher up along the pillar’s sides, like knotholes in a tree. Miles leaned closer and whispered his deya name, “Mileseryl.”

Silence. But then what did he expect? This was not a tree trunk. No deya dwelled inside.

Abandoning the ruin, he trailed through patches of dry grass bent low by the Dragon Queen’s tail. Yaniff was strange and beautiful. Someday he’d explore the other dragon temples he’d seen from the air, climb the far mountains, and view what lay beyond.

A low rumbling sound crossed the desert. Miles spread his legs and adjusted his stance. The ground shuddered. The next mighty tremor knocked him flat on his back. Stone towers swayed left and right. Two crashed down fewer than ten feet away. Miles rolled on his side, tried to get up and run, but the molten sand pitched and rolled like a yellow sea. From the far-off camp, Breal was racing toward him.

“Breal! Lie down, boy!”

Meer Eason leaped onto a terrow, and the dragons all took to the air.

The desert shook. Miles got up and stumbled forward, shouting. Clouds of choking dust surrounded him, cutting off his view. How could the dragons fly over and sweep him up off the shuddering ground if they couldn’t see him? He screamed louder and tried to stand, then fell
back on all fours. In the next violent tremor the desert cracked. Before he could leap back, the split tore into a great fissure, and Miles plummeted down.

A narrow beam of sunlight poured into the crevasse. Miles slowly came to and saw a crack of blue above the high, earthen walls. His head pounded, and his chest and back felt badly bruised. He crooked his neck, peered down the deep crevasse, and gasped. He would have fallen to his death if he hadn’t been caught here, but he was not on a ledge. He squinted at the dirt wall and let out a hoarse scream. A giant’s skeletal hand thrust from the raw earth and clutched him with long, bony fingers.

“Help, someone!” No sounds of movement from above. Couldn’t they hear him? He called again, his voice cracking with strain.

The bony hand seemed to grip him even tighter. Was the skeleton alive? Would the giant draw him back inside the earth? Sweat soaked his shirt. He should shape-shift smaller, free himself, but he’d never shifted to a smaller animal before, and the idea terrified him. What if he were trapped in a helpless little form, condemned to live out his life as a lizard or a mouse? It was unthinkable.

His rib cage ached, and his legs were numb. His flesh twitched with fear, indecision, anger. “Help!” he called again. “I’m trapped down here!”

Loud barking from above. “Breal! Get one of the dragons!” Breal lifted his muzzle and howled. It wasn’t long before Miles saw the Damusaun flying overhead, before she carefully winged down into the wide rift.

“Don’t move,” she ordered. No trouble there. He hadn’t been able to do anything so far but turn his head.

Flapping her wings to stay in place, the Dragon Queen used her sharp talons to free Miles from the skeleton hand. Once she had him securely in her claw, she flew up and placed him gently on the sand.

Miles sat up dizzily and spat. “Thank you,” he wheezed. Every breath sent sharp pains across his chest and back. Had that hideous thing broken one of his ribs? Meer Eason leaped down from a terrow and ran toward him.

“Miles! We thought … Are you all right?”

“My ribs are a little sore.”

The Damusaun left them together, and Meer Eason knelt and ran his hand along Miles’s ribs. It was a gentle touch; still, Miles sucked air between his clenched teeth.

“Some bruising, but I’m fairly sure the bones are not broken.” He wiped the dust from his hands. “Are you thirsty?” Eason pulled out his water pouch, found it empty, and headed for the river.

Miles rested his head against Breal’s furry neck. The Dragon Queen flew back and settled on the sand before him.

Miles looked up. “What was that horrible skeleton hand that caught me?”

The Damusaun tipped her head. Her cheek flaps wobbled. “What hand?”

“The hand. The … giant bony thing back there in the chasm!”

Breal whimpered. Miles hadn’t meant to raise his voice to the Dragon Queen, but surely she’d seen it? She’d freed him from it, after all.

“That was no hand, Miles. You were caught in Kwen’s roots.”

“Kwen? The World Tree?” He squinted up at her. The sun haloed her head in blazing white. “Did Kwen fall … here?” he asked.

The Dragon Queen drew a rune in the sand with her claw. “Since the breaking, we have guarded Kwen’s
remains and watched over his offspring. The greatest descendants grew here in Yaniff, their younger brother and sister Waytrees grew in Jarrosh.”

It was hard to imagine a forest here, where miles and miles of barren desert blotched with dry grass led to the rocky foothills. Even the mountainsides were bare.

“I don’t see the remains of any trees at all, let alone the remains of a giant one.”

The Damusaun nodded toward the pillars.

Miles blinked. “But that’s an ancient ruin. Those pillars are made of stone.” He’d touched one less than an hour ago. Marble, he was sure of it.

“After Kwen was buried under the earth, a vast forest sprang up here in Yaniff,” said the Dragon Queen. “It looked to be many thousands of tall white trees, but we dragons knew they were all shoots growing from Kwen’s trunk, still partly living underground. These ‘pillars,’ as you call them, were once a vast green forest before they were covered in volcanic ash long ago. When they died, their siblings, the azures of Jarrosh, became the oldest living Waytrees of Noor.”

She twitched her ears. “The quake awakened our hope, pilgrim. We saw the World Tree move. Kwen cared
enough to catch you in his roots. Why do you think he did this?”

“Wh-Why?” Miles repeated. He was lucky to have fallen into the tree’s thick white roots, but it didn’t mean the World Tree had reached out and caught him. “I don’t know why,” he admitted.

The Damusaun thrust forward and snapped her jaws, as if to bite off his head. It’s one thing to have a master crack a switch across your palms in school and quite another to have a dragon snap her long teeth at you. Breal yelped and fled a few feet back. Miles would have jumped up, too, but his legs were still asleep. He rubbed them hard. Thousands of needles pricked his skin from thigh to heel.

Meer Eason returned with the water. Grateful for the interruption, Miles drank thirstily, emptying the entire pouch. His teacher was prepared to stay, but the Damusaun tipped her head and flicked out her slit tongue. “You will leave us for now, Meer Eason.” The Music Master glanced at Miles, then bowed and said, “Come on, Breal.”

When they were alone, Miles said, “Damusaun, my mind still isn’t clear.”

She nodded in agreement.

“And the reason is,” he went on more bravely, “I’m worried about Hanna and Taunier. And my little brother still needs to be rescued. I promised my da I’d find him, so I can’t be sitting about here in Yaniff. I need you to show me where I can cross over.” He stopped, knowing he was babbling. There had to be a way in still.

“You think we abandoned the Kanameer?”

“Not abandoned her, just, well …” He gazed up at the Dragon Queen’s blazing, yellow eyes. In the stark sunlight, her scales sparkled like gemstones. Whatever came out of his mouth seemed to anger her. “I just think we have to go back after her and the others. I mean, I have to go,” he corrected. “Because Hanna’s my sister and—”

“We cannot go where she has gone, pilgrim.”

“I know you can’t go before Breal’s Moon night, but I can go.”

She shook her head.

A bolt of fear shot up his back. “What do you mean? I’ve been to Oth before. There must be a—”

“Where were you when we held the Dragon Council?” Smoke huffed from her nostrils.

He was too ashamed to say he’d fallen asleep.

She made a clicking sound with her tongue. “The dragon bridges from Noor to Oth are fallen now.”

Heat raced across the desert in waves. Miles’s head spun, and he tried not to be sick.

“I have ordered the clan to dig,” said the Damusaun.

Miles looked over his shoulder and saw terrows and taberrells flying in and out of the rift he’d been caught in, like bees busy with their hive.

The queen’s head swayed. “It will take them some time. Can you walk?”

The nausea he’d felt a moment ago had passed. Miles managed to stand upright, though his knees wobbled. He took shallow breaths to keep his ribs from screaming.

“When youth fails us, we return to ancient things.” The Damusaun turned about. “Come, if you wish to see the cave of bones.”

T
hey hiked another hour on the trail through All Souls Wood, trying to run ahead of the shadow spreading from the deep rift where the worlds were torn. For that was what it was, Hanna learned: a creeping dark growing from that rift. According to the sylth, Yona, the darkness had swallowed all the other lands of Oth, and everyone but a few like herself who’d managed to escape had been caught in a deadly sleep.

Yona was strong of build, with red hair and brows that tilted over deep green eyes. She’d led a handful of sylths, forest creatures, and Othic folk on an arduous journey toward the light. But she eyed the shadow that was moving now across the face of the mountain. “This
is all that is left,” she said. “We’d thought Mount Esseley and All Souls Wood would be safe, but darkness comes even here.”

Hanna shuddered, remembering the sylth boy she’d tried to awaken. He was still asleep, still caught in the dark. She knew it wouldn’t be long before the rest of Mount Esseley blackened into endless night. If they were caught, they’d fall into dreamless sleep like the others, lying as still as the dead in the encroaching dark.

“Yona, how long have the lit lands been disappearing?”

“Two moon cycles now.”

Two months. Hanna’s mind went back to late August, when Tymm was Wind-taken and the Waytrees of Shalem Wood thundered down. On that day she’d not yet known that the Waytrees of Othlore Wood had fallen, too. “It’s when the Waytrees in our world began to fall,” she said. “Not just in my forest home on Enness Isle, but everywhere.”

She tried to imagine the dark wave swallowing the magical sylth kingdom of Attenlore she’d seen last year in western Oth. Her heart raced and her hands went cold as she thought of the darkness engulfing the glimmer
cities in all the Othic kingdoms, cities whose very walls shone with light. She imagined the deep shadow blotting out prairie, mountain, and valley in every land, even in the dragonlands of Twarn-Majas, where the Damusaun said the beautiful mountains were made of deep-blue stone.

There were so many places in Oth she’d never had a chance to see, so many magical beings felled and lost.

Carrying Zabith piggyback, Taunier passed a mossy boulder and caught up with Hanna. They were all overcome with exhaustion and hunger, the trail crowded with fauns and sylth folk hefting the youngest children up the path. Tymm rode on Grunn the Troll’s left shoulder, and Cilla perched on his right. Both clutched the troll’s beard, parting the hairy mass in the middle. Cilla was braiding her half. Her rugs were prized at home, but she wouldn’t be able to do much with Grunn’s tangled beard.

Farther back, Kevin and a few of the older children hiked soberly alongside the deyas. Evver dragged his large, rooted feet. His head was down, his shoulders hunched. Behind him, deyas leaned against one another, swinging their empty hands as they strained to keep up.

Stopping at a vantage point, Hanna spied a black
void looming over the high mountain ridge, and pointed to it.

Yona shivered. “The Outer Darkness,” she said.

Hanna felt chilled looking at it. It was more ominous than the thick shadow creeping along the mountainside. “Why so much worse up there?” she asked.

“The darkness deepens closer to the center of the rift,” Yona said. The tallest trees, the ones they needed desperately to reach, were just below that dark-rimmed peak. They talked of turning back, but there was nowhere else to go.

The snowy mountaintop stood white against the weight of blackened space as they hiked closer to it.

“Why do the splitting worlds send this horrid darkness?” Taunier asked. “Why does it put everything in its path to sleep?”

“The two worlds were bound in their making,” Yona said. “Even now, what happens in one will affect the other.”

“It’s not going dark in Noor,” he argued.

Zabith tapped him on the head. “There is more than one kind of dark,” she said. “It’s the loss of magic in Noor that casts a shadow here.”

“Ah,” said Grunn. “What’s bound is bound.” He crashed his meaty fists together. “We trolls knew the dark was comin’ afore it began.”

Yona scoffed, “We sylth surely would ken this loss before you.”

“We’d a song my lady.” He drew his shoulders back, Tymm and Cilla rising higher as he did so. He sang gruffly in Trollish. Yona translated for him: