Human shrieks and dragon roars culminated in a full-throated trumpeting from Mercor as he crashed into the knot of struggling males.
Sestican went down, bowled over by the impact. His spread wing bent dangerously as he rolled on it and she heard his huff of pain and dismay. Ranculos was trapped under the flailing Kalo. Kalo attempted to roll and meet Mercor with the longer claws of his powerful hind legs. But Mercor had reared onto his hind legs on top of the heap of struggling dragons. Suddenly he leapt forward and pinned Kalo’s wide-spread wings to the ground with his hind legs. A wild slash from the trapped dragon’s talons scored a gash down Mercor’s ribs, but before he could add another stripe of injury, Mercor shifted his stance higher. Kalo’s head and long neck lashed like a whip but Mercor clearly had the advantage. Trapped beneath the two larger dragons, Sestican roared in helpless fury. A thick stench of male dragon musk rose from the struggle.
A horde of frightened and angry keepers ringed the struggling dragons, shrieking and shouting the names of the combatants or attempting to keep other gawking dragons from joining the fray. The smaller females, Fente and Veras, had arrived and were craning their necks and ignoring their keepers as they ventured dangerously close. Baliper, scarlet tail lashing, prowled the outer edges of the conflict, sending keepers darting for safety, squeaking indignantly at the danger he presented.
The struggle ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. Mercor flung back his golden head and then snapped it forward, jaws wide. Screams from the keepers and startled roars from the watching dragons predicted Kalo’s death by acid spray. Instead, at the last moment, Mercor snapped his jaws shut. He darted his head down and spat, not a mist or a stream, but only a single blot of acid onto Kalo’s vulnerable throat. The blue-black dragon screamed in agony and fury. With three powerful beats of his wings, Mercor lifted off him and alighted a ship’s length away. Blood was running freely from the long gash on his ribs, sheeting down his gold-scaled side. He was breathing heavily, his nostrils flared wide. Colour rippled through his scales and the protective crests around his eyes stood tall. He lashed his tail and the smell of his challenge filled the air.
The moment Mercor had lifted his weight off him, Kalo had rolled to his feet. Snarling his frustration and humiliation, he headed immediately toward the river to wash the acid from his flesh before it could eat any deeper. Carson, Spit’s keeper, ran beside him, shouting at him to stop and let him look at the injury. The black dragon ignored him. Bruised and shaken but not much injured, Ranculos scrambled to his feet and staggered upright. He shook his wings out and then folded them slowly as if they were painful. Then, with what dignity he could muster, he limped away from the trampled earth of the combat site.
Mercor roared after the retreating Kalo. ‘Don’t forget that I could have killed you! Don’t ever forget it, Kalo!’
‘Lizard spawn!’ the dark dragon roared back at him but did not slow his retreat toward the icy waters of the river.
Sintara turned away from them. It was over. She was surprised it had lasted as long as it had. Battle, like mating, was something that dragons did on the wing. Had the males been able to take flight, the contest might have gone on for hours, perhaps the entire day, and left all of them acid-seared and bloodied. For a moment, her ancestral memories of such trials seized her mind and she felt her heart race with excitement. The males would have battled for her regard, and in the end, when only one was the victor, still he would have had to match her in flight and meet her challenge before he could claim the right to mate with her. They would have soared through air, going higher and higher as the drake sought to match her loops and dives and powerful climbs. And if he had succeeded, if he had managed to come close enough to match her flight, he would have locked his body to hers, and as their wings synchronized …
‘SINTARA!’
Mercor’s bellow startled her out of her reflection. She was not the only one who turned to see what the gold drake wanted of her. Every dragon and keeper on the meadow was staring at him. And at her.
The great golden dragon lifted his head and then snapped opened his wings with an audible crack. A fresh wave of his scent went out on the wind. ‘You should not provoke what you cannot complete,’ he rebuked her.
She stared at him, feeling anger flush her colours brighter. ‘It had nothing to do with you, Mercor. Perhaps you should not intrude into things that do not concern you.’
He spread his wings wider still, and lifted his body tall on his powerful hind legs. ‘I will fly.’ He did not roar the words, but even so they still carried clearly through the wind and rain. ‘As will you. And when the time comes for mating battles, I will win. And I will mate you.’
She stared at him, more shocked than she had thought she could be. Unthinkable for a male to make such a blatant claim. She tried not to be flattered that he had said she would fly. When the silence grew too long, when she became aware that everyone was watching her, expecting a response, she felt anger. ‘So say you,’ she retorted lamely. She did not need to hear Fente’s snort of disdain to know that her feeble response had impressed no one.
Turning away from them all, she began stalking back to the forest and the thin shelter of the trees. She didn’t care. She didn’t care what Mercor had said nor that Fente had mocked her. There was none among them worth impressing. ‘Scarcely a proper battle at all,’ she sneered quietly.
‘Was a “proper battle” what you were trying to provoke?’ Her snippy little keeper Thymara was abruptly beside her, trotting to keep up. Her black hair hung in fuzzy, tattered braids, a few still adorned with wooden charms. Her roll down the hill had coated her ragged cloak with dead grass. Her feet were bound up in mismatched rags, the make-shift shoes soled with crudely-tanned deerskin. She had grown thinner of late, and taller. The bones of her face stood out more. The wings that Sintara had gifted her with bounced lightly beneath her cloak as she jogged. Despite the rudeness of her first query, Thymara sounded concerned as she added, ‘Stop a moment. Crouch down. Let me see your neck where he bit you.’
‘He didn’t draw blood.’ Sintara could scarcely believe she was answering such an impudent demand from a mere human.
‘I want to look at it. It looks as if several scales are loosened.’
‘I did nothing to provoke that silly squabble.’ Sintara halted abruptly and lowered her head so that Thymara could inspect her neck. She resented doing it, feeling that she had somehow given way to the human’s domineering manner. Anger simmered in her. Briefly she considered ‘accidentally’ knocking Thymara off her feet with a swipe of her head. But as she felt the girl’s strong hands gently easing her misaligned neck scales back into smoothness, she relented. Her keeper and her clever hands had their uses.
‘None of the scales are torn all the way free, though you may shed some of them sooner rather than later.’
Sintara sensed her keeper’s annoyance as she set her scales to rights. Despite Thymara’s frequent rudeness to Sintara, the dragon knew the girl took pride in her health and appearance. Any insult to Sintara rankled Thymara as well. And she would be aware of her dragon’s mood, too.
As she focused more on the girl, she knew that they shared more than annoyance. The frustration was there as well. ‘Males!’ the girl exclaimed suddenly. ‘I suppose it takes no more to provoke a male dragon to stupidity than it does a human male.’
Sintara’s curiosity was stirred by the comment, though she would not let Thymara know that. She reviewed what she knew of Thymara’s most recent upsets and divined the source of her sour mood. ‘The decision is yours, not theirs. How foolishly you are behaving! Just mate with both of them. Or neither. Show them that you are a queen, not a cow to be bred at the bull’s rutting.’
‘I chose neither,’ Thymara told her, answering the question that the dragon hadn’t asked.
Her scales smoothed, Sintara lifted her head and resumed her trek to the forest’s edge. Thymara hurried to stay beside her, musing as she jogged. ‘I just want to let it alone, to leave things