Exile (Fire and Valor)

1. Andreas

ANDREAS

The village wasn’t very impressive, but the humans were building.

Encroaching.

More and more every year, they tried to take every single inch that had once been dragon lands.

At first, I’d been hard-pressed to hate them for it. We as a race had enslaved them, and we’d deserved for them to rise up against us. My father had always called them sub-dragon and said they were like children who needed to be told what to do, but he’d been a jackass.

I hadn’t even mourned when he’d been killed by the very humans he’d sought to enslave.

But my own small band had broken away from dragonkind well before the humans had risen up.

We lived on our own, cared for ourselves, and stayed in the far reaches of the northern plains, where we couldn’t possibly offend anyone.

All we had wanted was to live our lives without hurting anyone or being hurt by them in return.

Sometimes, when humans fleeing dragons had come through the area, we’d hidden them from dragons and their servants, because everyone had a right to live their own damn life, and owning anyone was abhorrent.

But in the years since the humans had overthrown dragons, they’d been breeding in numbers incomprehensible to us, and spreading across the land like a spilled cup of wine, seeping into every corner and cranny. They made no distinctions between dragons who had been slavers and those who had not.

And now they had come to our tiny bit of the world. They’d settled in the valley beneath the mountains and started building a village there.

In the spring, they had come across my sister while she’d been hunting goats at the foot of the mountains, and killed her. We had found her body hacked to pieces as a gruesome warning to us.

All I had left of her now was a single egg, the first she’d ever laid, that lived on in my carefully tended fireplace.

After we lost her, we had moved far to the east, into the caves on the rocky shore many leagues away from the humans, but still, I worried.

What would stop them from moving even farther east and taking the caves from us too? From killing my niece or nephew if I managed to hatch them?

Not that hatching the egg was a certainty.

I’d never hatched an egg before. I only had the vaguest idea how such a thing even worked. I knew I needed to keep it as hot as I could. Eggs could only thrive in the warmth of a dragon’s fire. That was the extent of what I knew. Hundreds of years old, and I’d never had a hatchling in my clan.

“They’re building huts,” Harri said, looking behind himself as he marched into my cave. It sounded like part of an argument rather than an announcement to me, but somehow, he still managed to answer thoughts I’d been having right at that moment. “We have to do something.”

He looked back to me as Gareth and Bran followed him in, both looking just as concerned as he was.

Still, Gareth was always the voice of reason. “What can we do? We don’t want to be as bad as our ancestors, and commit violence against people just for existing. Everyone has a right to live.”

Harri scowled at him. “Like they had a right to kill Eilonwy?”

“They probably thought they were defending themselves. We earned this reputation, Harri. Humans have a reason to fear us. They—”

“I haven’t earned anything. I’ve never hurt a human in my—”

“Enough!” I shouted them down. They all turned to me, Harri still looking petulant, while Gareth and Bran seemed relieved not to have to continue the argument.

It was . . . well, it was uncomfortable was what it was. We’d left home as children, all of us hating with the way dragons lived. All the drama and backbiting, and most of all, holding an entire race of people as property.

But that meant that we didn’t have a leader.

We had all fallen into the habit of doing as Eilonwy ordered because dragons were traditionally matriarchal and she’d been the only woman among us.

Since her death, the others had taken to looking at me as leader.

I was the oldest by a few decades, and, I suspected, they were treating leadership as hereditary, which it had never been in dragon clans.

Still, my mother had been a leader among dragonkind, and then my sister, so I was now the closest thing we had to a leader, even if it was the last thing I wanted.

“The humans who came to the coast to fish are building huts,” Harri said after the silence had gotten awkward. He was pouting.

I understood, to a degree. He was the youngest of us. He hadn’t spent as many years watching the way our people had treated humans. He didn’t truly understand why the humans were angry with all dragons.

After all, he personally had never victimized any of them.

Still, he also wasn’t wrong. The humans in the valley we’d lived in before were building a castle, enormous and stone and permanent.

Everywhere they went, they settled and took over.

If we let that happen here, where would it end?

We had let them push us out of the valley.

These craggy shores were the last refuge left to us.

They were inhospitable enough, fit for growing nothing, but at least we could still fish for food.

We couldn’t move into the ocean itself, and the mountains were almost too cold to survive.

They were barren and gray and we’d likely starve to death up there.

No, a line had to be drawn, and if it ended in our deaths . . . well, this situation was going to do that anyway. Better to die fighting to survive than accept our fate and wander into the frozen mountains to starve.

“We burn the huts,” I told them. Gareth gasped and opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a hand to forestall him.

“We round up the humans living in them, and take them back to the castle they’re building where they killed Eilonwy.

But first, we burn the huts. We make sure they know this is where we live.

They can live peacefully in the castle, or elsewhere further south, but this land is ours.

This tiny patch of nearly-barren land shouldn’t be worth fighting for, to them.

They have the whole of the south and west. They can go anywhere. ”

Harri clearly wanted an angrier response, and Gareth a kinder one, but neither of them protested. Bran was the one to point out the obvious. “They’ll try to kill us. Both when we destroy the huts and when we return their people.”

“Then we’ll die fighting for this pathetic corner of land. We can only run so far away.”

Harri scowled and grumbled, “It’s barely worth fighting for.”

He wasn’t wrong, but it was what we had left, and that made fighting for it necessary, if not a choice we’d have made under other circumstances.

It was only ten humans, and I didn’t like to be the arrogant dragon who underestimated people, but it wasn’t that hard to round them up and burn their huts. Frankly, it made me feel every bit the violent monster they all thought me.

They all stared on in fear as the huts burned, my brethren holding them back. So I turned to my two-legged form and stood before them. Apparently I was an unsightly human to them, because most of them gasped and looked away, shocked and horrified.

That was fine.

If anything, it helped our cause.

“We intend you no harm,” I said.

One of them scoffed, so I lifted a brow at him and waited. He glared at me. “You’re burning our homes.”

I looked at the hut, then back at him, unimpressed.

“Humans have taken every other part of the land for themselves. This tiny inhospitable corner is ours. We have ignored every other part of the land you’ve taken, but you’ll not take this bit.

You’ll not shove us right into the sea.” I stepped in front of him and looked him in the eye, holding his gaze for as long as he would.

“This is where the line is. Go back to your castle and live your lives in peace, as we wish to do. Leave us to this tiny corner of rocky land. We will not interfere with you, if you do not interfere with us.”

“This land is owned by Llangard,” he insisted, though he didn’t look up and meet my eye again.

I didn’t know who Llangard was, but damn him, this tiny corner was not his or his leader’s. “Then you go tell her she must fight my clan for this corner of rocks and water. See if she’s willing to die for it. Because we will. It is our home. You will not take it from us.”

Then each of us, in our shifted forms, snatched up armfuls of humans and took off toward the castle.

It was bigger than the last time I’d seen it; a sturdy square foundation, with walls so thick I doubted a dragon would be able to topple them once they were finished.

I had no interest in toppling them, though. Only making sure the humans stayed in their place while my people stayed in ours.

Peace.

Still, that didn’t stop them from shooting at us the moment we drew near. “We are returning your own,” I shouted from the air, but they heeded nothing, only shot flaming arrows, trying to take us in the wings.

Damn them and their intractability.

I motioned to the others. “Fly low and drop them in that field, then go.”

“Andreas,” Bran said, clearly concerned I was going to get myself killed, and . . . well, I might. But I needed to distract the humans and give my brethren a chance to get back home. Also, I didn’t want to hurt the humans I was carrying.

I tossed my head in the direction of home. “I said go!”

Then I aimed for a spot between the field and the castle, tucking my wings to avoid being shot in one of them, and roared my irritation, making both the humans in my arms and at the castle cringe away.

One didn’t, though.

As I landed, one human rushed forward. He was wearing full armor the others weren’t, and carrying an enormous shiny sword.

“Run,” I growled at the humans as I let go of them, and they did. They ran faster than I had imagined them capable of running, toward the castle and their fellow humans.

The one with the sword kept coming toward me, though.

“Stay back,” I shouted. “I am not here to fight. Only to return your invaders. Leave us be!”

He didn’t stop, though, and all I could see in that moment was my sister’s body, hacked to bits by human blades and strewn across the ground like she was so much refuse.

Without thought, I breathed in and let loose a gout of flame.

I would not force my people to survive me the way they had my sister. Especially not when they were close enough to see the murder happen.

When the human paused and held up a hand, I thought little of it. Warding off incoming danger was second nature, whether it was possible to succeed or not.

When my flame split down the middle and passed harmlessly by him, I . . . might have panicked, just a little bit.

Magic, the kind wielded by the mass murderer Athelstan Cavendish, was the bane of all dragonkind. Even if I took to the air right then and flew away, this monstrous creature could cut me from the skies, take the air from my wings and kill me without any chance of escape.

I thought the humans largely justified in their war against us, but this? This was too much.

I didn’t deserve to have the air taken from me for existing as a dragon. Before I thought the actions through, I was leaping forward, grabbing the armored human in both hands, and leaping into the air. He couldn’t crash me into the ground when that would also kill him, could he?

Well, he certainly could, but that would be ridiculous.

Oddly enough, he didn’t attack me. He had a sword in his hand, and he didn’t even use it. He didn’t wriggle or fight or hit me with his tiny two-legged fists.

He simply went still in my arms, and allowed himself to be carried off.

The only problem left, then, was that we’d been trying to return the humans to each other. What the fuck was I going to do with another one?