“But the cuff hasn’t got a lock,” Blade panted. “I think Barnabas put it on by magic. Can you get it off by magic?”

“No,” said Kit. “All the cuffs are fastened by a spell I don’t understand. That’s why I bit—”

Blade saw him look sideways and then upward. He rolled his head against the sticky, sandy fur of Kit’s chest and saw the fire hoses being lighted.

“Drop,” said Kit. “We may be lucky. I think it’s going to rain. Drop and run.”

Blade thumped to his back on the sand. It had certainly gone very dark, he saw, as Kit jumped aside. The crowd was bawling and screaming, and the men with the hoses were, for some reason, pointing their streams of fire up into the air. Perhaps the gas did not go out quite at once. Blade jumped to his feet, into a tremendous roll of fire. Both sides of the arena vanished in it for a moment. There was a sound that seemed to be thunder. As Blade staggered a few steps, fairly sure that the arena had been struck by lightning, the blaze cleared to show the exploded remains of barrels, shriveled hoses, and charred benches with little flames flickering on their edges. At the narrow ends of the arena, people were fighting one another to get out. And the thunder was louder than ever.

An enormous voice boomed out of the thunder. “Can’t you fly, cat-bird?”

“No, sir,” Kit shrieked. “Broken wing.”

“And I can’t land. Place too small. What’s wrong with the boy?”

“Iron!” bellowed Kit. “Stops his magic.”

“Stupid little beasts. Get beside him and keep still then.”

Blade collected his wits enough to look upward. Scales was hovering over the arena, filling the whole sky with the booming of his webby green wings. As Blade looked, Scales extended both gigantic forelegs and scooped Blade and Kit up in his talons. They might have been dolls. The great wings cracked like whips as Scales fought for height to get out of th

e burning arena, clutching the two of them to his hot, scaly chest. There came a painful jerk as they got to the end of Blade’s chain. Blade felt the cuff leave his wrist and craned out to watch it fall, chain and all, back into the sand, and wondered for a moment if his hand was down there with it. He held it up, in front of a whirling, diminishing view of a town with a huge pile of smoke rising from somewhere in the middle, and found he still had a hand after all. Then they were going up again, to level out. Kit, dangling like a kitten being carried, shot Blade a look, a mixture of shame and delight. Blade knew how Kit felt. You felt stupid, being carried by something this large, and very uncomfortable. Scales’s horny claws bit in around you, and Scales’s great voice came rumbling through the enormous, hard, bellowslike chest the claws had you clamped against.

“Stupid. One of them can’t heal himself; the other one can’t do iron spells. Any hatchling dragon would be better off than that.”

Though it was plain that Scales was simply grumbling to himself, Blade and Kit both squirmed. “Nobody taught me iron spells!” Blade called out.

“Even if I did know how to heal myself, it wouldn’t have helped!” Kit bellowed. “They clipped my wings!”

“Quiet,” Scales grunted. “Got to find the place—Oh, there she is.”

They were now well out over grasslands, faded creamy with the autumn. Blade saw the pale stretch of the earth tilt and rotate beneath them as Scales wheeled in against the wind. The great wings above and behind him cupped with a sound like a storm. The ground came rushing in toward them. It was much rougher than Blade had thought, and full of rocks. Scales’s voice rumbled, “Letting go now.”

Blade and Kit found themselves dumped on the grass, sliding. While they staggered and bumped into one another, Scales glided in to land beside a tall boulder which had a small golden shape dancing on top of it. “There you are, girl. No problems. Got you the black cat-bird, too, while I was at it. I thought you’d want him. No accounting for tastes.”

“Lydda!” Kit and Blade screamed.

Lydda rose up rampant to wrap both forearms around Scales’s huge neck and rub her beak delightedly against his great muzzle. “Thank you, Scales. I love you.” She looked tiny beside him.

“My pleasure,” grunted Scales. “I like you, too.” He had a preening sort of arch to his neck, as if he meant it.

Lydda laughed, leaped down from her boulder, and bounded to meet Kit and Blade. They did the griffin dance none of them had done since they were small, circling and jumping, wings spread, arms waving, all of them laughing their heads off, until Blade ran out of breath and left the other two still at it. Lydda looked small to him, even now. This was a new Lydda, he realized, slender and sleek and bright-eyed, with a deadly look to her talons and an even more deadly look of power to the glistening sweep of her long bent-up golden wings. She was batting Kit joyfully on the beak with them, but they still looked deadly.

“Hey! Doesn’t she look tremendous!” Blade said to Scales.

“Good hunter, too,” Scales agreed. “I met her out hunting yesterday. That’s how she knew where I was, after she’d trailed you down to that sandpit. How did you get into that mess? Eh?”

“Barnabas. He’s being paid by Mr. Chesney to mine for magic,” Blade said. As he said Mr. Chesney’s name, Scales once again went lizard still. “But I don’t know how Kit got there,” Blade added.

Kit and Lydda were now jumping over one another by turns, wings spread and beating. The contrast between Lydda’s spread of golden feathers and Kit’s clipped ones was painful.

“Grow some more feathers, cat-bird,” Scales boomed. “It’s unsightly.”

Kit stopped prancing. He spread out the wing that had been broken and stared at it. His head swiveled accusingly at Scales.

“That’s right,” said Scales. “I could mend that. But I don’t grow feathers.”

“But,” said Kit, “I can’t. They won’t.”

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Derkholm Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net