Dragon Raider Read online

  Focus, Lila! I told myself. Don’t overthink. Do!

  Cautiously grabbing onto one edge of the nest, I pulled myself up around the edge and stared inside.

  Three eggs. Three, glorious dragons – each the size of my head, fat and round, and heavy with the life that they contained inside. One was blue, one was yellow-orange, and one was a speckled turquoise.

  Which one? I hadn’t been prepared for this. I had thought through every eventuality on the way here – how I would drag the skiff up to the line of scrub trees and hide it in case any of Havick’s scouting vessels were out, how I would race down the beach if I was disturbed… But not which type of dragon I should choose to save the Raiders. In fact, it was faintly baffling why there were three completely different eggs here in the first place. I thought dragons might be like the sea birds of the cliffs: one set of parents, one egg – but what if they were more like the sturdy little island goats – all of the nannies and kids together in one warm place? Could there be multiple dragon mothers laying eggs in one nest?

  The danger had just escalated three-fold, if that was the case. I would need to be quick.

  Could I take all three? I patted the canvas sack on my back and knew that it wouldn’t hold more than one. I could feasibly put one down my shirt and maybe be able to climb back down one handed—

  Ugh. No. A sudden wave of vertigo just at the memory of that awful climb swept over me. “Okay then, not three…” I whispered, wondering just how angry a mother dragon would get if she lost two of her eggs rather than just one.

  Pretty angry, I guessed. An angry mother dragon was the very last thing that we Raiders needed on our heads. But one egg? Surely, she won’t miss one out of three, right?

  But which one? I looked at the blue, the orange, the turquoise. The blue dragons were long and thin, right? And the sea-green turquoise where the commonest sorts of dragons we had around here. They flew in flocks, small but fast, sharp beak-like snouts as they dove into the water and out.

  But what about the orange? Did they even have orange dragons way over in the Dragon Academy? Wouldn’t it be something when word reached the court of Queen Saffron that a Raider girl had managed to train a rare orange?

  Didn’t they have orange dragons down in the southern kingdom? I cursed the fact that, not for the first time, we Raiders had to rely on rumors from passing travelers or stolen bits of knowledge and lore we could get from our plunder. If only I knew more about dragons!

  The blue will be quick, but they have notoriously difficult tempers, I thought as my hand hovered over the blue egg. The orange dragons of the deserts haven’t even been tamed yet. My hand wavered over that one. It would be a great accolade, but I had no way of knowing if it would be a disaster. At least with the speckled turquoise – which had to turn into our more local sea green and blue, right? – at least with that one I had seen them flying, I knew a little bit about them?

  I grabbed the warmth of the egg, and at that exact moment two things happened.

  The egg pulsed with a beat, as the creature inside hammered on its thick shell. “Huh!” I gasped, and the air about the cave was split with the trumpeting call of a returning mother dragon.

  “Skreyar!”

  Chapter 2

  Danu, compass whispers.

  The small compass needle that my master Afar Nguoa gave me spun wildly, first this way and then that, and I wondered if maybe the dark-skinned witch of the Southlands had been wrong all along.

  Maybe I’m not meant to ever be a mage. Maybe this prophecy is all just some fevered dream and fantasy!

  The stars knew that the coven called the Western Witches had been wrong before. The head of our Order, the ancient Chabon Kaidence had been the very one to dream up this little bit of prophecy – that there was a rightful heir to the island realm of Roskilde, one who would overthrow the usurper Havick and restore law and peace to the Western Isles.

  “But then again,” I said to the no one and nobody that I shared my boat with, “Chabon was also the one to claim that the Dark King Enric would rule for five hundred years – and look what they say happened to him?” The Dark King of Torvald had been overthrown by an upstart boy and a girl from the Western Isles, or so they claimed them to be, and now, almost twenty years later, the Kingdom of Torvald was one of the most powerful realms in the world.

  ‘Prophecies can be turned awry, Danu – just as often as they can come true…’ That was what Ohotto Zanna, the other Western Witch I had trained under had counselled me. To me, that sounded a bit like a get-out. If a prophecy could either fail or come to existence equally, then surely that means that some prophecies are just plain old wrong?

  “But not this one,” I whispered. Please, not this one…

  My personal mentor Afar had been of the opinion that this was one of Chabon’s more accurate dreams. It shared the same qualities of other important dreams that Chabon had experienced in the past—it occurred as a nightmare, it kept repeating itself – but it also seemed to match what was happening ‘out here’ in the Western Isles. The royal line of Roskilde failed some seventeen years ago when their boat was butchered by Sea Raiders, and Havick rose to power. The Sea Crown since then had never sat on its rightful bearer. That not only was this going to come to pass, but it also had to come to pass. Afar, with her caustic humor, curved ivory staff of office and her dark eyes was more of the opinion that if you wanted magic to work, then you had to get out there and do something. Which was partly the reason why I found myself here, on this boat in the middle of the Western Ocean, and about as far from the witches enclave of Sebol as I had ever been.

  That, and the fact that if I could prove this prophecy was coming true. I stared hard at the horizon. If I could have a hand in making it happen, then Afar would nominate me to go forward in my training. I would no longer be “Adept Danu” but would instead start the mage training. “Mage Danu of the West.” I rolled the title around in my head. It had a nice ring to it, didn’t it?

  Of course, I would still have many, many years of studying before I graduated with the blessing of Afar and Ohotto and Chabon and all of the other Western Witches on the Isle of Sebol – but I would have done it! I would be the first mage trained in a hundred years! No man had managed to master the arts that came so naturally to the Western Witches. I had to do it. I had to prove that I was right in following this thread of prophecy… That I had the talent for magic in the same way that Afar or Chabon or any other did…

  So, once again, I took a deep breath and tried to quiet my excited thoughts. I tried to remember the dream fragments, the very ones that Afar had told me meant that I was deeply connected to this particular prophecy.

  A girl. A baby rising from the seas, and the crown of Roskilde on her head.

  Suddenly, the compass hand started to slow in its maddened spinning, and pulled slowly, deliberately, north-east. It had to be a sign. It had to be a part of the magic that was in my veins. I looked out into the layer of blue and grey where the sky met the water. Was that a distant shadow of rock there? An outcrop of land, straight in the direction that the needle pointed?

  “Come on, please – more…” I tried again, tried to find the pulse of magic inside my heart... But it was no good. The compass returned to its maddened wavering and wobbling once more. “Gah!” I could have thrown it overboard, I was so frustrated. Why was it that my magic could manifest only at certain times – when I was angry or upset or filled with great passion, and the rest of the times it was erratic and unsteady?

  Would even Afar believe me if I told her that I had managed to make the compass needle point the way towards the prophecy?

  Annoyed and feeling very far from ‘Mage Danu of the West’ I grabbed the tiller with one hand and pulled on the sail rope, to catch the breeze that would shoot me over the waters, straight to the island I had thought I had seen.

  It had to be there. It had to be…

  Chapter 3

  Lila, and fish-boy

  SKRECH!”
The roar was deafening as I fell backwards from the nest, the speckled-turquoise egg abandoned next to its siblings, and stumbled backwards onto the ledge of the cave.

  “Sweet Mother of the Waves…” I breathed the familiar Raider half-blessing, half-curse as I looked at what was coming for me.

  There was a Sinuous Blue dragon, filling the sky like a thunder cloud as it spun around the outcrop, its long, coiling and curling body stretching halfway around to the other side of the small islet.

  I didn’t know much about dragons, but I knew that it could have killed me in an instant if it had wanted to. So, it hasn’t killed me yet. Maybe it won’t fight near its eggs. Maybe it doesn’t want to kill me… But its roar shook the Bonerock, and made me think of the clash of storm lightning or the deep tumult of the hurricane seas. She held her claws tucked up under her body, but I could see that each one was as long as a Raider’s sword, and could easily tear me in two.

  But Queen Saffron had lived with the dragons, I told myself again, trying to bolster my thin courage. She had managed to master any fear she had of them – and if she can, I can! I crouched on the ledge, widening my stance as the Sinuous Blue flew closer in tighter spirals.

  “Lady Dragon!” I called out to it, but the words were torn from my lips by a mighty buffet of wind from the dragon’s wings as she came in to land.

  “Woah!” I staggered on the edge, seeing just what a long way down that it was going to be. I couldn’t even climb that fast, without the mother blue picking me off like a crab on the shoreline. My stomach churned, and the ground shook as those great claws seized the rocks of the atoll and the Sinuous Blue curled her body protectively around the rocks, like a snake coming to eat its prey.

  “La-lady dragon, I have a request!” I managed to breathe once more as a head the size of my boat swung around the final bend to regard me, her golden eyes flashing. I was terrified. I was in awe. They said the eyes of a dragon had the power to enchant you, if you let them – and I had to say that they were beautiful and awful at the same time, in the same way that a sea storm can also be tremendous when you are tucked safe in your fort, but able to look through the shutters as bolts of lightning tore apart the sky.

  Her snout was beak-like, with many rows of needle-sharp teeth that she was showing me. She had the swept-back horns of her breed, and I swore I could see sparks drifting from her nostrils as she focused on me, opened wide her mouth, and bellowed.

  “Aiii!” I couldn’t help myself. I screamed as the bellow of dragon anger pushed me back, almost bowling me over as I was buffeted, one foot losing its footing, and the other reaching out to find solid ground—but there was no solid ground underneath it, only thin air…

  Blue and white.

  Up and down made no sense, and my limbs were shouting in agony, but I resisted the urge to open my mouth and scream. ‘Kick out! Right yourself! Kick up!’ That was the training my father had given me. He had thrown me into the small harbor water myself at seven years old, along with all of the other native-born Raider kids to learn how to swim.

  Froth, rock, the buffeting of strong currents.

  The water flared from white to dark all around me. No sense using my eyes. Use my feet, my hands, any other sense instead.

  The bottom of the atoll’s rocky cliffs was a churning crush of currents, relentlessly battering the Bonerock. My arms and shins stung with scrapes from where I must have already been thrown against the rocks under water, but the action wasn’t so violent now. I must be between the wave crashes, or else underneath them. My feet scraped on rock and through silt, and I knew that up was the other direction of that.

  Luckily for me, if there was anything that we Raiders were good at other than capturing merchant ships, it was swimming. My father’s isle of Malata held swimming competitions several times a year, and there was rarely a month that went by without the need to get wet, as we say. It might be working on the hulls of a boat, or hauling up the crab pots, or simply swimming for the joy of it. I wasn’t the best swimmer on the island, but I was as good as most – and that made me better than any non-Raider, I was sure of it.

  Dive under the waves. Use the pulling-out. Avoid the crash. I fought to keep my mouth closed as I moved, getting away from the rocks and further out along the coastline, knowing that I had to move quickly lest I be taken up by the next wave surge and smashed once more.

  My chest burned with the need to take a breath – but not yet. Make sure I wasn’t in danger of the waves taking me first…

  I kicked again, and then again, before I had to get to the surface. Using the dolphin movements, I angled myself up towards the lighter blues, greys, and finally the bursting whites of the sky as I popped up like a cork, to find that I had drifted a good hundred feet or more from the bottom of the cliffs around the edge of the island.

  “Ugh.” I coughed, spluttered, bobbing in the water as I checked that the dragon wasn’t following me (it wasn’t; there were wisps of smoke emerging from the dark opening—it must have retreated into the cave, its ill-tempered residence). Then I tried to get my bearings. Where was the beach from here? My boat? This far out, the waves were slowly pulling me out, dragging me into the Western Ocean more than they were pushing me towards the atoll. I would have to use every bit of strength to fight it to get back, and I was already tired with bleeding legs and arms…

  But what else could I do? I couldn’t return to father emptyhanded, he already thought that this was a crazy scheme. I couldn’t allow the Raiders to fail when Havick came to cut them down.

  “Ahoy! Ahoy!” Someone was shouting, and, as the sudden swell of the ocean lifted me up, I saw what the hummocks of water had hidden from me before: rounding the atoll’s rocks was a tiny sailboat with a figure braced against the tiller and the rope, cutting the prow straight towards me…

  Who was he? I wondered, seeing the white crossed-over tunic, the heavy trousers and the waved robe of a stocky figure. Not old though. A bit younger than me, perhaps, but a teenaged boy nonetheless.

  I was in no position to refuse this stranger’s help, even though I knew that most islanders hated us Raiders, and would sell us out to Havick as soon as look at us… But he pulled alongside me and threw out – quite expertly, I had to admit – a thick rope, attached to buoys of cork wood.

  “Grab a hold!” he shouted at me, as if I had never had to do this before in my life. Gratefully, however, I seized the ends of the rope and let my unlikely savior do the hard work of pulling me in.

  Chapter 4

  Lila, the princess

  Just what do you think you were doing?” the young man said to me, his eyes wide in a glare of shock. Not the rescue welcome I was expecting, I had to admit as I sat on the bottom of his tiny boat, wringing out my braid of hair over the side. I was, of course, absolutely soaked from head to toe – but at least the sun was high. In that Raider’s way, I just shook my head and changed my expectations. If you live at sea, you get wet.

  “What do you mean?” I said to the young man irritably. Who was he to talk to me like that? He looked only barely old enough to be running a boat on his own, with his soft skin and large, almond-shaped eyes. He had ragged brown hair, edged with bronze gold tips, and wore an over-robe of green to ape the sort that the witches and mystics of the south wore, and he’d said that his name was Danu.

  “That’s one of the Dragon Isles,” Danu said emphatically, as if it were something that everyone knew.

  “Yeah?” I said. That was why I was there, dummy!

  “And that particular isle has got a nesting mother on it right now. Brood mothers get really twitchy around their eggs – we’re lucky that she’s not hanging over us right now, trying to cook us to a crisp,” he said seriously.

  You’re telling me? I thought. I had stood right in front of that brood mother, and I had looked down her gullet, straight past her rows of sharp teeth. But still, I wasn’t going to tell this guy that, or why I was here. “I’m not scared of a dragon,” I lied.

  �
��Well, you should be,” the fisherman’s son said with a frown as he tugged on the guideline, leaning in and against the wind as he did so to angle our boat away from the atoll.

  Away from the atoll, my mind suddenly caught up with what the rest of me was thinking. Away from my boat.

  “Hey! Wait – I need to go back,” I said quickly, half standing easily in the boat and pointing back at the atoll which was now considerably smaller on the horizon.

  “What? No!” Danu shook his head. “I think you’ve had enough sightseeing for one day, don’t you think?” He cleared his throat, and said in a high-minded voice, “Dragons are not creatures for our amusement…”

  Pig, I thought. Great. I get saved by the most uptight fisherman’s boy in the entire Western Ocean. “I wasn’t going there to look at dragons,” I said fiercely.

  “Why where you going to a dragon’s island, then?” Danu glared at me. Who did he think he was? Like he owned this stretch of ocean, did he?

  “None of your business! Now I need to go back to that island because I have left my boat there, and I need my boat to get back to my homeport,” I stated.

  “Pffft. It’s not worth getting yourself eaten over. I can take you home…” He said the last bit awkwardly, like he really would have preferred to be going back to whatever he was doing out there in nowheresville, Western Ocean.

  “No,” I said flatly. There was no way that I could let this guy sail me back to Malata and the other Raiders. The Sea Raiders had only managed to survive so far by being very secretive as to their homeports. Could I trust this kid? “If you won’t take me back to the island, I’ll just have to swim.” I took a breath and prepared to dive overboard—