Eight - Ranulf
I walked muchfarther from the cottage than usual, making my way to a clearing a few miles away instead of the banks of the river. I didn’t know when Gideon would wake up and start his hunt, and I didn’t want to take any risk of him seeing me transform.
The legends from before the Node Wars were filled with tales of impossible magics. Time and embellishment warped fact into fiction, but not everything was a tall tale. Still, some legends needed to remain nothing more than stories told around a fire.
A healer’s magic was based on knitting together bones and flesh, changing a body until it became whole. With enough power, the possible changes were almost limitless. Shifting into animal forms used to be the predominant use of the mage-power. But without a node to draw on, most body-changers couldn’t manage the shift, or if they did, it left them so exhausted it was a pointless endeavor. Those who could manage the feat did not advertise the fact. Maintaining my secret was as much about protecting healers as a whole as protecting myself.
I stripped and slipped the necklace with my summons crystals and emergency charm off over my head, letting it dangle from my wrist. I pulled on the magic and let the transformation take over. I shouldn’t have been able to transform into a dragon. Not because I didn’t have the power—though the change in size affected the amount of power needed to shift, the node was more than sufficient for the task—but because I didn’t know how a dragon’s body was put together.
Healing power required guidance. If my grandmother attempted to shift into a dragon, she could kill herself. She didn’t know how the internal organs of such a foreign creature worked. I had managed the transformation through childish ignorance. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, but through a combination of my innate magic which let me see the inner workings of a body and the sheer force of node power I had pulled during that first transformation, I somehow lived.
The fear-laden lecture delivered by my grandmother after she learned what I had done had an unintended consequence. Though our family had studied the anatomy of wolves and a few other creatures for generations, and shifting into those forms was commonplace while on node lands, I couldn’t do it. After my successful transformation into a dragon, I had learned to fear the dangers of shifting, and I could not bring myself to try another form, even more than a decade later.
I knew my body as a human and a dragon, and that was all.
It meant our secret was harder to hide, even with the help of the residents of Wulfkin and Ortfel. The villagers did their best to protect their healers, but they could only hide so much. Gideon wasn’t the first who had come to Drakona to hunt dragons.
Since he didn’t believe the villagers’ stories that the dragon flew over the forest but roosted in the mountains, it was now up to me to convince him.
I spent most of the morning flying in lazy zigzags over the river, where the hunter would be sure to spot me in the sky. When I didn’t catch so much as a glimpse of him, I widened my flight path, soaring over the forest, with my eyes trained on the land below. In dragon form, my eyesight was keen enough to pick out the individual leaves on trees from miles away.
I had been in the air for hours by the time the hunter spotted me soaring over a clearing. I wondered what he had been doing all that time. Hoping to catch a dragon slinking between the trunks of the trees?
I set a course for the river, meandering, but clear enough that the hunter would certainly head in the correct direction. Once he reached the river—where he should have been watching for me in the first place—I’d have enough time in his sight that I could set the trail for the mountains.
I reached the river and fell back into the zigzag pattern I had used earlier. It kept me visible from the riverbank for most of the path but limited my progress upstream to a pace a human could match.
When I spotted Scarlette at the edge of the river, her head tilted up with a single hand shading her eyes, I had the sudden urge to spin through the air or indulge in other showy maneuvers. I wanted her to notice me. But I didn’t need to do a trick to catch her attention. I stopped flying back and forth and followed the path of the river.
That’s when I noticed that Scarlette’s hair was unbound, and she had loosened the top laces of her bodice. She was standing by a relatively calm section of the river. Perfect for swimming. And I had sent Gideon on a path directly toward her.
I had to make her return to the cottage.
I dove, my wings spread wide as I aimed straight at her. It would be terrifying. She’d probably scream and bring Gideon directly to her even faster, but that was better than letting him stumble across her once she was already in the river.
She didn’t scream. I risked going even lower, but she didn’t react until I was over the river in front of her. She fell, and I beat my wings, angling upward at the sharpest incline I could manage. That should do it.
I kept gaining altitude, wanting to see if Gideon had emerged from the tree line anywhere downstream. I leveled out at a height that let me scan miles of the riverbank, but I didn’t see him. Letting an air current carry me back the other direction, I saw Scarlette. She hadn’t left.
As I watched, she finished unlacing her bodice and pulled it off.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to dive. I folded my wings back and hurtled toward the ground. At the last possible moment, I flared my wings, slowing my descent, and pulled on the node’s power.
I dropped to the ground in human form, the force of my landing sending me into a crouch. I caught myself with a single hand and pushed upright, grabbing the leather thong with the summons crystals from where it had landed as I did. “What are you doing?”
Scarlette gaped at me. Her cheeks grew red. She tried to look anywhere but at me.
Ward help me, she was more concerned with my lack of clothes than the fact that I had been a dragon moments earlier. We didn’t have time for this. I snapped my fingers, and her gaze snapped back into focus on my face. “Scarlette. What are you doing out here when you know Gideon is skulking about?”
“I was hot after picking blackberries.” Her voice had an edge I had never heard from her. “I wanted to go for a swim. What are you doing?”
“Trying to scare you into showing a little sense! There was a dragon diving at you. I was a dragon a moment ago. Why aren’t you screaming?”
“Do you want me to scream?”
Ward save me, how could she be this calm? “I wanted you to show a sense of self-preservation.”
“I didn’t think the dragon . . . you . . . would hurt me.” Finally, her composure slipped. She stumbled over the words as she fully absorbed the situation. I supposed shock could affect people oddly. “You’re the dragon.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I should be worrying about the fact that I had exposed my secret to her, but it hardly felt critical compared to everything else. “Yes, I’m the dragon. And I was trying to lure the hunter to the mountains. He’ll be in this part of the forest any minute now. What were you doing? Did you want him to stumble across you naked?”
“Of course not! I just wanted to go for a swim. He isn’t hunting me.” She glanced behind her at the forest, then faced me once more, her voice dropping to a whisper. “He’s hunting you. You have to leave.”
“You’re worried about me?” I asked incredulously.
Her eyes were wide with the fear I had tried to instill earlier. “If he’s close, you need to go now.”
She was extraordinary. I dove at her in dragon form, shifted into human form before her eyes, warned her that another man was on his way to where she was about to bathe in a river, and her only concern was I was the huntsman’s target.
She was also right. Except, I didn’t know how close the hunter was. “I can’t risk shifting back,” I told Scarlette. “He can’t know that I’m the dragon.”
She didn’t ask questions. She bit her lip, then her attention snagged on something behind me. “Get in the water.”
“What?”
“Get in the water,” Scarlette repeated. Her hands flattened against my chest and she pushed gently. “It will explain your lack of clothes.”
I took a step back. I was right on the edge of the river. A branch snapped somewhere in the trees behind us and Scarlette pushed harder, her eyes bright with fear.
Reflex had me clamping my hands on her wrists as I fell. I tried to let go, but it was too late.