The Griffin's Feather (Dragon Rider 2)

He looked anxiously at Maia. ‘It’s too soon!’

She gave the soft growl that showed something amused her very much. ‘The shell is still so thick that they couldn’t get out even if they tried. And how stupid do you think our children are?’

The eyes that looked mockingly at Firedrake were golden like his, but Maia’s eyes were rimmed by tiny copper-coloured scales that made them look larger. And her eyelashes were dark green, like the needles of the spruce trees that grew outside the cave. Firedrake fervently hoped that their children would inherit Maia’s eyes.

‘You know they take almost twelve weeks to hatch,’ she said. ‘And Ben is only a day’s flight away. You ought to take advantage of the opportunity.’

Firedrake bowed his head. He was ashamed of the nostalgia that he felt. Everything that he had ever wanted was here. No, more than he had ever wanted.

‘We never have all we want, Firedrake,’ said Maia softly. ‘I dream of flying south, on and on, to places I have never seen before. Or to the moon!’

‘The moon?’

‘Yes, why not? There are stories of dragons who flew there.’

‘Right, then we’ll do it when we first take the children out flying!’

Outside, the sun was setting. Three other pairs of dragons shared the cave where Firedrake and Maia had built their nest. By now more than twenty caves in the surrounding mountains were inhabited. The eighteen stone-dwarves who, like the thirty-four brownies who had come from Scotland with them, lived in some of those caves. Ten more dwarves from the nearby mountains had joined them in the course of time. Those dwarves had six arms each, like the local brownies, more and more of whom were moving from the Tian Shan mountains to live in the valley of the Rim of Heaven with the dragons, as they used to do. There was more than enough space and food in the valley for them all – even if the Scottish dwarves were always quarrelling with the Nepalese dwarves, because they were envious of the six arms that meant they could swing several pickaxes at once. It speeded up their search for gold and precious stones a good deal.

Yes. Firedrake came out of the cave and breathed in the cool mountain air. His place was here. Ben didn’t need him; Barnabas looked after him so well.

All the same, he couldn’t get Maia’s words out of his head. The boy is only a day’s flight away. You ought to take advantage of the opportunity.

No.

No, Firedrake.

He spread his wings and rose into the clear, cold evening air. The lichens that Maia needed flowered on the other side of the lake – the lake over which he had flown long ago, with Ben on his back.

Only a day’s flight away…

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In The Jungle

‘What is this,’ said the leopard, ‘that is so ’sclusively

dark, and yet so full of little pieces of light?’

Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories

The screech with which Me-Rah welcomed the rising sun woke Ben from his restless sleep. He had been dreaming of Firedrake. Of course. In his dream, he had summoned him with the scale, and they had flown together over the thousand times one thousand islands. The dream had felt so real that before Ben crawled out of his tent he instinctively reached for the locket with the scale inside it. Barnabas had given him the locket when he showed him the scale. ‘You’d better not carry that present around in your jeans pocket,’ he had said, taking the tarnished silver locket out of his backpack. The head of a unicorn was moulded inside the lid. ‘I once bought it from a silversmith to remind me of all that we’ve lost already,’ Barnabas had said. ‘But it’s time it had a less tragic purpose.’

The locket was just large enough to take the dragon’s scale, and the clasp closed with a reassuring snap. Ben had not touched Firedrake’s present itself again, for fear that it would make the dragon sense his longing to see him. Now that he and Twigleg had heard those screeches in the night, the danger that the griffins represented seemed much more real, and Ben was glad that Firedrake was far away, in safety – although he kept catching himself closing his hand around the locket.

Hothbrodd was lashing his plane down with another rope when Ben crawled out of the tent-louse. The troll had used one of the griffins’ poles to help him, ramming it between the rocks.

‘By Odin’s ravens, I hope the griffins don’t take that as a challenge!’ murmured Barnabas, as he let the tent-lice scurry back into their box. ‘Trolls aren’t the most sensitive beings on this planet.’

‘But they have very good hearing, Barnabas!’ called Hothbrodd, throwing the crabs that had settled on his green skin overnight back into the sea.

Lola was refuelling her plane on the beach, and as usual the troll was winding her up by saying that her tiny aircraft consumed higher-proof fuel than his own plane. The arguments between the two of them were getting more imaginative and extensive every day, as if every insult that they exchanged consolidated the friendship that linked them.

Ben had stowed provisions and tools in their backpacks the evening before. Hothbrodd’s was larger and heavier than a fridge, but the troll slung it over his shoulder as if it hardly weighed any more than Twigleg. Ben was very glad to have Hothbrodd with them, even if it was confirmed, yet again, that trolls interfered seriously with reception on mobile phones and by radio. On the other hand, the jungle waiting for them had no power sockets anyway, and it was a fact that Hothbrodd wasn’t the only reason why their mobile phones hadn’t been able to send messages for days now. They had sent their latest news through to MÍMAMEIÐR over the transmitter on the plane.

Lola had suggested that she could spend another day investigating the island from the air before the others set out to explore it on land. But the thought of the Pegasus eggs made Barnabas forget his usual caution. His idea was to venture on a preliminary expedition with Hothbrodd, while Ben and Twigleg stayed with the plane, trying to get in touch with Vita and Guinevere, but Ben replied only that he hadn’t flown from Norway to Indonesia just to sit on a beach getting worked up over the lack of radio reception.

Twigleg ventured to interrupt them. ‘There are forty-seven species of Indonesian snake whose venom can be fatal to human beings, master!’ he said. ‘Maybe you ought at least to sit on Hothbrodd’s shoulders!’