The Dragondain Read online

  For a moment, all was quiet. Then Jasper popped into a sitting position swatting away at unseen enemies until the throbbing pain in his temple brought him back to reality. Tentatively, he probed the area and found an angry lump.

  “Is everything all right in there?” came the aristocratic voice. “Do you require assistance?” said the voice slowly, in the way a person might talk to a small child who didn’t speak the local dialect.

  “Um. No. Not necessary,” shouted Jasper, reaching for clothes and pulling them on. “All good here. No need to send in assistance.”

  Moving fast, Jasper shot an arm through his jacket, tucked what he now surmised was his uncle’s necklace under his shirt, and double-knotted his sneaker’s laces because, even though he had no idea what was going on, he was really sure he didn’t want to end up running around with one sneaker.

  The larger branches made good handholds. “Be right—”

  Jasper’s head crested the rim of the nest. He was in the center of a large encampment. A dozen bonfires burned brightly, hissing and spitting as though they’d been constructed of damp wood, illuminating vast stands of cypress trees, pools of brackish water, and . . . Rinn, hundreds of Rinn.

  “—there.” Jasper gulped.

  Forest Rinn, to be more precise, with their short, golden fur and the gigantic bows strapped to their long backs. All, that is, but two long-furred Valley Rinn, if his guess was right.

  There were also creatures he didn’t recognize, like the two oversized otter-looking things standing at attention by the long-furred orange Rinn who had peeked over the edge of the nest. There was something strange about that Rinn. Its fur and eyes were more like the color of Forest Rinn, but its coat was long and exceedingly well kept, as though it had been combed that morning. It was also the only Rinn there, Forest or Valley, wearing a war saddle.

  The other Valley Rinn sported what his sister would call a red chestnut coat. Its emerald eyes darted about, as it avidly followed the progress of a huge moth circling one of the bonfires. The Rinn’s rear end was hunkered down, and every time the moth circled, its haunches would sway side to side as though readying to launch. It was a very house cat-like behavior and Jasper couldn’t help but snicker. The big Rinn must have heard this, though, because after Jasper snickered it sat bolt upright, suddenly looking very dignified, though its eyes continued to dart excitedly and whiskers twitch as the moth made its next pass.

  Jasper spotted a horrific, snoring pile of teeth, legs, and ears near one of the crackling fires. There appeared to be a superabundance of legs. Jasper considered his internal Moon Realm bestiary to be quite complete, but he had no good guess at to what was in that pile-up.

  The tall bird with the bright blue plumage tilted its head, staring at him with one fiery orange eye the size of a fist. It couldn’t have been more than a foot away from the nest and had been standing so still that Jasper hadn’t even noticed it until it moved. It was then that Jasper noticed all the other birds, hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes perched within and around the trees.

  “I don’t believe we have met,” stated the great bird. “My name is Aleron.” Aleron flexed his great blue wings and bowed his head. “And this is Her Majesty, Nimlinn Goldenclif, of the clan Broadpaw, Queen of the Valley Rinn,” he continued, nodding to the great orange Rinn wearing the saddle, “and Roan,” he finished, nodding to the chestnut Rinn.

  Not knowing exactly what was proper, Jasper lowered his head to each of them in turn, bowing most deeply to Nimlinn. Although Roan returned his bow with a slight nod, Nimlinn remained erect, looking regal and eyeing him with what Jasper correctly guessed was suspicion.

  “Where is Lily?” said Nimlinn.

  “Nimlinn!” interrupted Aleron. “All in due time.”

  Aleron’s voice had been the aristocratic one, and Jasper could tell—somehow—that the voice was male. When he thought about it, he realized that it was through this same means that Jasper now knew Nimlinn’s voice had a definite female quality.

  The bird settled a great blinking eye on Jasper. “And your name would be?” he asked very pleasantly.

  Jasper eyed them all again, marveling at how real everything seemed.

  “My name—” Jasper placed a hand to his oddly constricting throat, which was no longer speaking English. “My name—” he placed his other hand over the pendant, pulsing on his chest “—is Jasper Milfoil Winter.”

  Jasper turned to address Nimlinn, one hand still to his throat, which felt funny every time he spoke. “Lily is my younger sister,” he choked. “But how do you know her name?”

  Nimlinn leaned back, standing slightly taller, and her eyes grew wider. “What! Did she tell you nothing?!”

  Jasper scrunched up his eyes in thought. “She said somethin’ . . . I don’t know . . . Does it matter?”

  With that, Jasper climbed over the edge of the nest and leapt to the ground, which was soft and damp. When he straightened back up, he noticed that Roan had placed an enormous paw over one eye and was slowly shaking his head. It was a very human expression that somehow didn’t seem so out of place. Nimlinn was speechless. But Aleron was not.

  “I see,” he said matter-of-factly. “Then we have much to do. Nimlinn, you should get back to Sea Denn—immediately. Your forest kin will keep you safe along the ocean road and through the pass. Roan’s clutter can protect you as well. My flock, for the time that we occupy your lands, are, of course, at Your Majesty’s service.”

  Distracted, Nimlinn nodded to Aleron, muttering what might have been a thank you. But her outraged gaze quickly returned to Jasper, and she found her tongue.

  “What did Lily tell you?” she demanded.

  Jasper pursed his lips. “I don’t know. Somethin’ about . . .” Jasper thought hard, trying to remember the dreamy conversation in his room. “. . . about . . . going back somewhere.”

  Nimlinn narrowed her eyes, sweeping her ears back in what would be, for Tarzanna, a very angry manner. “Tell me,” she said slowly, “exactly what transpired.”

  “Well . . . I was sleeping in my bed, and Lily was shaking me.”

  “So you were asleep?”

  “Yeah, and I was dreamin’ something. I don’t know what, but it wasn’t as good as this—”

  “Wait!” interrupted Nimlinn, and now her voice took on a new menace and her gigantic whiskers began to twitch. “Am I to understand that . . . you think me a dream?” she roared.

  “Nimlinn!” said Aleron. “Control yourself!”

  Jasper took an involuntary step backwards and felt his shoulder brush up against the nest. Roan leapt from his post behind Nimlinn and positioned himself so he could interpose between Nimlinn and Jasper.

  Nimlinn bent down on her front paws, and her tail, as thick as a fire hose, twitched from side to side. Her long fur puffed out, and she seemed to grow in size. “What else did she say?” Nimlinn pressed.

  With the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Jasper pinched a big piece of flesh on his left forearm.

  Sure seems real, he thought.

  Jasper tried to remember, but it was all very foggy. “I . . . I think I threw her out of the room. Then I went back to sleep.”

  Nimlinn closed her eyes and bowed her head, her anger seeping away.

  “Aleron,” she said more calmly. “Explain to him what you understand of the coin. Be certain he knows where not to set it.”

  Nimlinn turned to her otter-like servants. “Wyflings!” They leapt to attention.

  “Snerliff, inform Roan the wirtles are now his charge. Twizbang, prepare to depart!”

  Twizbang’s eyes widened and appeared to get stuck that way. “But Your Majesty, Roan is standing right over there. I’m sure he heard—WE’RE GOING THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS!” he said, and his whiskers appeared to freeze in place, sticking out at odd angles aro
und his gaping mouth.

  “We will take the pass to Armashen so as to keep close to the forest Rinn. Their bows are the best match for the dragonflies.”

  Jasper looked sideways at one of the bows on the backs of the forest Rinn. The arrows were the length of spears.

  Jasper spread his thumb and finger to the length of a dragonfly, furrowed his brow, then bounced his glance several times between the spear-sized arrows on the nearest Rinn’s back and his fingers. “Best . . . match, wait . . .” But just then the entire encampment of birds, as if on some unspoken signal, took to flight. The sound was deafening, and the wind was strong enough to tousle Jasper’s hair. In seconds, only Aleron was left.

  “Jasper,” called Aleron, hopping nimbly before him. “Quickly! The moon coin, let me see it.”

  “The moon what?” said Jasper.

  “The coin! The coin at the end of your uncle’s necklace!” said Aleron.

  And for the first time, Jasper seriously entertained the thought that this might not be a dream.

  Leaning forward, hoping Nimlinn wouldn’t hear, Jasper said, “Aleron . . . I’m not dreaming, am I?”

  “Would that you were, my friend. Now show me that coin.”

  Jasper fished out the pendant from under his shirt and held it between them as Aleron explained how to open and close the fob; how to spin the inner circle of moons; and how the little circles on the coin represented all the other moons. He ticked off the names, but Jasper knew them well. He’d heard them many times before.

  “Wait, you skipped this last circle,” said Jasper.

  “Did I?” asked Aleron, his eyebrows raising inquisitively.

  “Yeah. This one. With the little moon next to—”

  “Yes?”

  Jasper licked his lips. “Tell me more.”

  “Quite. Nimlinn tells me it took a full day for the coin to recharge before sending Lily to Dain, which is a new detail to me. But do not use that as a hard and fast rule. It could be different going to other moons that are at opposite sides of the sphere, or back to . . .”

  “Where I came from.”

  “Precisely: the coin’s recharge time may very well be influenced by how close you are to your destination. We know that Dain was very close when Lily went there.”

  As things became more and more complicated, Jasper became more and more nervous.

  “Sphere?” asked Jasper.

  “Yes. The sphere is the area within which the various moons of the Moon Realm travel.”

  Suddenly, Jasper was transported to the bedtimes of his youth. Uncle Ebb was sitting on the bed, holding his hands in a sphere.

  “And all of these moons,” Jasper began, in a dreamy voice, “circling and spinning around themselves, in turn circle one sun. And when a moon within the sphere is closest to the sun, we call that Sunward. And when a moon within the sphere is farthest from the sun, we call that Darkward, and in the middle . . . “ Jasper’s voice trailed off.

  “The Middling,” finished Aleron. “Good, you do have some sense about where you are. Tell me—”

  “Lily went to Dain,” said Jasper, more as a statement of fact than a question. “Wait . . . Lily was here on Barreth first? How long is a day here?”

  “Nimlinn will tell you many things . . . I’m sure . . . maybe,” added Aleron, not sounding too confident. “I, however, must rejoin my flock. If what Nimlinn has said about that saddle is true, we will be hard pressed to keep up with her—although we will have the advantage of the straighter path.”

  Jasper stared confusedly at Aleron. “But Aleron, you’ll be flying, right? In the air?”

  “We will not be the only ones flying tonight, my friend.” Aleron leaned forward. “Hold tightly to that saddle.” Then Aleron spread his great wings, beating them against the air.

  With the last of the fires doused, and the last of the forest Rinn departed, the darkened camp was nearly empty. Even the horrific pile of sleeping paws and teeth was gone.

  A vague memory tugged at Jasper’s mind, one of Roan arguing with Nimlinn while Aleron was explaining the workings of the moon coin. Jasper watched the two wyflings busily attending to Nimlinn, who now lay on her long stomach so they could more easily climb up and down the handsomely tooled saddle resting on her back.

  The deep of night was on them, but it was not dark. Looking up, Jasper noticed for the first time the great moons hanging in the sky: some full, some hiding behind others, and behind them all, a black background pierced by a teeming sea of bright stars.

  “Oh my,” said Jasper to no one in particular.

  He took up the pendant at the end of the necklace, studying its face by the moonlight.

  Lily! he thought. This is your doing! And if this is no dream, and if I am truly in the Moon Realm, then Uncle Ebb’s bedtime tales were . . . not . . . just . . . stories.

  He looked up from his scrutiny of the coin, suddenly aware that Nimlinn, posed like a slit-eyed sphinx, had been studying him.

  “Your Majesty,” said Jasper somberly, “do you know where my uncle is?”

  But she just continued to stare at him, making him feel more uncomfortable. Not knowing what to do with his hands, he nervously stuffed them into his pockets. He pulled out a LUNA Bar, tore off the wrapper, and began eating. What else had Lily put into motion? Jasper tried to pull back the memory of what his sister had said after waking him, but nothing more would resolve. Annoyed, he thrust the half-eaten bar back into his pocket.

  “Your Majesty, where is your Dainrider? And why are you the only saddled Rinn?”

  Nimlinn’s tail twitched suddenly, and one of the wyflings, his arms full of supplies, had to leap quickly to avoid it, letting out a little yelp.

  “I have no Dain rider,” said Nimlinn, slowly and with great menace.

  “I don’t understand. Did you lose him?”

  “Lose him? I have lost no one. Your sister, Lily, is the only one ever to grace my back.”

  Jasper thought this very odd. It certainly didn’t jibe with Uncle Ebb’s descriptions of the Rinn and their cool-headed Dainriders; in Ebb’s tales, they were like one being when they rode together. “But without a Dainrider, how do you make good decisions in battle—”

  Nimlinn’s claws shot out of their sheaths and dug effortlessly into the soft earth. Her head twisted slightly to one side and a strange, deep sound came from her throat. Slowly, she mastered herself, and her claws retracted.

  “It is time for us to go,” she said. “Climb aboard. Snerliff, make sure he is properly strapped into the saddle, and see that the two of you are well situated.”

  The wyflings helped Jasper into the saddle, and Jasper held out a hand to each of them in turn. The pads of their paws were soft and warm, and the tufts of fur between their fingers tickled. Once they were all ready, Nimlinn sprang up and settled into a galloping gait, plowing through or weaving around the dark pools of water, easily bounding over the smaller ones.

  Several times Nimlinn leapt into what appeared to Jasper to be total darkness, as the encroaching canopy of trees above them blocked out so much of the moonlight. But Jasper remembered the bedtime tales about the Rinn. He knew that with even scant moonlight, a Rinn could see as if it were daytime. Even in complete darkness, there was much a Rinn could discern from the way air currents swirled about its whiskers and fur.

  They entered a wide glade where the light was strong enough for Jasper to see that they had arrived at the edge of a towering forest and that Nimlinn was steering them to what looked like a black tunnel leading into it.

  Within the tunnel, the darkness became absolute, yet Nimlinn increased her pace. The wind blew strongly through Jasper’s hair, and he found that to keep his eyes from drying out, he had to narrow them to slits.

  “Your Majesty—” he shouted.

 
“You do not need to scream in order to be heard.”

  “I’d like to know what’s going on. What did Lily do while she was here?”

  For a long time, they moved through the night air with only the sound of the wind in Jasper’s ears.

  “Your Majesty! Where is Rinnjinn?”

  Nimlinn made a growling noise that Jasper took for exasperation.

  More time passed.

  At last Nimlinn’s voice boomed out in the darkness. “You will need to know . . . a few things, I suppose.”

  She explained to Jasper the powers of the saddle, including its ability to grant sleep. She gave a brief account of the morning of the crossover and Rengtiscura’s attack. Jasper cringed when he heard about Lily’s mistakenly setting the coin to an unknown moon, and he felt Nimlinn’s disappointment as she described the meeting with Aleron that came just too late. She mentioned nothing about Roan’s darkness or The Tomb of the Fallen. Jasper, for his part, asked many questions, especially about Rengtiscura, the scaramann, and the dragonflies; he, like Lily, had heard nothing of these in the bedtime tales.

  Slowly, Nimlinn began to see that Jasper was not the complete dolt he had first appeared to be. He impressed her with his knowledge of Sea Denn’s defenses and of how important it was not to storm Fangdelve—and with his understanding that Greydor had acted in the only way he could. During this discussion, it became clear to Nimlinn that Jasper possessed a tactician’s mind and that his way of thinking was very different from Lily’s. After Nimlinn described the faster route through the mountains, Jasper surprised her by presenting a sound argument for returning that way. He pointed out that if the dragonflies were about, once they saw the spacing of Roan’s clutter, they would most likely post themselves in a position that would allow them to mount a surprise attack. If Nimlinn cut through the mountains, although they would be alone, they would be far from defenseless. This saddle was no mere riding saddle, but a war saddle bristling with armament. And the dirazakein, the razor-sharp hubcap-sized discs that Lily had, with Snerliff and Twizbang’s help, loaded into the saddle, would be more than a match for any dragonflies. The only time Jasper wavered was when he wondered if Aleron might miss them. Here Nimlinn found herself in the odd predicament of arguing for Jasper’s plan, and in that moment, she knew that he was right.