5. Idrilia
IDRILIA
I had seen photographs. I had watched footage on the evening news. Nothing prepared me for the reality. Nothing could have.
—From the journal of Princess Idrilia of Tarina
The waiting was insufferable.
After the adrenaline of the avalanche and the frantic work of finding and treating the injured, there was nothing left to do but sit and watch the sky and try not to think about how cold it was getting.
Thankfully, we had emergency thermal blankets in our packs, but it was just one per pack, and some of the injured needed more than one for all the meager protection they offered.
I'd given mine to Horrov, bundling him in two, his glassy and unfocused eyes worrying me more than his broken arm.
Palel also didn't look good, sitting propped against a boulder with his bound collarbone, breathing in shallow, careful gasps, which told me his ribs were in worse shape than Sorel's initial estimate.
Denna had a concussion and a badly bruised hip, and her spectacles were bent beyond repair, but she was alive and lucid enough to complain about losing her notebook.
I'd never been so happy to hear someone complain.
The rest of the crew huddled in small groups along the mountainside, conserving warmth and energy, except for Jeffson, who stood scanning the horizon for our rescuers.
As far as I knew, there were five dragons in each flight, and I wondered if that would be enough. How did they even transport the injured? Some of them could sit behind the rider, but some could not. Did these rescue dragons carry special evacuation equipment?
If I weren't embarrassed by my secret obsession with dragons, I would have stood beside Jeffson and waited for the dragons to arrive so I could see them getting near. But I had to appear composed, and I did that by sheer stubbornness.
Underneath my calm facade, though, my mind kept cycling through the same calculations.
How long since the flare? Forty minutes.
How long for the base camp crew to reach the ranger station?
Twenty minutes, maybe less. How long for the call to travel through the protocol chain?
Unknown. How long for a flight to mobilize and fly to our position? Unknown.
There were too many unknowns.
What I knew for a fact was that I would compensate Voser's and Moran's families from my personal accounts.
The expedition was insured, so they would get paid by the insurance company, but that wouldn't cover a lifetime of lost wages by their breadwinners.
I had to make up the difference. It wouldn't bring back their loved ones, but at least they wouldn't be financially devastated.
That part was easy. The hard part was informing them of the tragedy. I could let Jeffson do that, but I felt obligated to do it in person. It was going to kill me, but I would never forgive myself if I cowered and let someone else bear the burden.
"Hey," Gavon said to catch my attention. "How are you holding up?"
I shrugged. "I'm not the one with a broken ankle. How is it doing?"
"Better than your guilt, it would seem."
I frowned. "I'm not—"
"Yes, you are. I can read your face with ease, and that pinched expression tells me that right now you're composing letters to Moran's and Voser's families in your head."
I had been composing my speech, not letters, but his guess was close enough.
I'd been rearranging words that would never be adequate, searching for a way to tell two families that their husbands and fathers had died on a mountain because a princess had insisted on crossing a boundary she shouldn't have.
If I had known the Silver Princess would cost me the lives of two porters, I never would have embarked on the expedition to search for it. But I hadn't known, and I'd taken risks before and had come out victorious.
This time, though, luck hadn't been on my side.
"Stop beating yourself up," Gavon said. "Right now, you need to focus on getting us home."
"There's nothing more I can do until help arrives."
"Then just sit with me and keep me warm."
I leaned against Gavon's good shoulder and stared at the sky. The auroras were shifting from green to violet, the colors rippling across the sky in waves that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat. Or maybe that was just the altitude playing tricks on my perception.
"What would you write?" I asked him. "For your script. If you were writing this scene?"
"I'd cut the waiting. Audiences hate waiting. I'd have the dragons arrive five minutes after the flare."
"That's unrealistic. Life doesn't edit for pacing."
"Which is why art exists." He shifted, wincing as the movement jostled his ankle. "But if I had to keep the waiting, I'd use it. Close-ups on the faces. The hope fading. The cold getting worse. And then, just when the audience thinks help isn't coming—"
He stopped.
"What?" I followed his gaze toward the sky.
"I think that help is actually coming."
I saw nothing at first. Just the mountains, the auroras, the empty sky stretching toward Elucia's impossible peaks. Then a flicker of movement, so small it might have been a bird or a trick of the light.
Did birds fly in formation?
Sometimes they did.
I looked at Jeffson, who had raised his hand to shade his eyes, squinting toward the peaks. For three long seconds, he said nothing. Then his weathered face split into a grin that took ten years off his age.
"The dragons are coming," he said.
The word rippled through the group. Heads turned, and even the injured pushed themselves up for a better view.
"I want to see!" Denna fumbled for her broken spectacles and shoved them onto her face, or rather tried, since the frame was so warped that she couldn't fit it over her nose. "I've never seen dragons up close."
"None of us have," Gavon said. "Which is a mercy. The only time Elurians get to see dragons is if they need to be rescued from a place no regular vehicles can reach."
I stood up and turned toward the eastern sky.
They came over the peaks in a tight V formation, the five of them moving with a speed that made the distances deceptive. One moment they were specks against the mountain skyline, and the next they were close enough for me to make out the shapes of individual wings.
The photographs in newspapers and books hadn't prepared me for the sight, and neither had the television footage. Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of five dragons descending through the sky.
They were enormous.
I'd known that intellectually, but numbers on a page of a scientific book were abstractions.
These were living, breathing creatures whose wingbeats generated a wind I could feel from a hundred meters away, whose scales caught and fractured the auroral light into spectrums I hadn't known existed, and whose presence made the air feel charged as if the magnetic fields bent around them.
The lead dragon was a deep rust-red, a female I assumed, given the colors and the slightly smaller size. She banked in a wide circle above our position, assessing the terrain and the situation from above, while the rest of the formation held their pattern behind her.
I couldn't breathe, but not from fear, and not from the effects of the altitude. It was awe, but also something more that I didn't understand.
Envy, whispered a small voice in the back of my head. I was envious of the riders. I wanted to be the one sitting on the back of that magnificent dragonia, but I never could. I didn't have any Elucian blood in me, and only Elucians could bond with dragons.
"Idrilia." Gavon's voice reached me as if he was speaking from a great distance. "You might want to close your mouth."
I hadn't realized I was gaping.
I closed it.
The lead dragonia circled once more, then descended toward a relatively flat section of the debris field about thirty meters from our position. The landing was precise, almost delicate despite her size, her clawed feet finding purchase on the ground among the scattered boulders.
I held my breath.
What if the ground collapsed under her? Despite being smaller than the males, she was still huge.
The other four remained in the sky, circling overhead.
The rust-red dragonia's rider dismounted and strode toward us, pulling off her flight goggles to reveal sharp eyes that swept our group. I had no doubt that she was cataloging injuries, counting heads, and evaluating terrain simultaneously.
I wondered if she would comment on our location being within Elucia's borders. We were not supposed to cross the boundary. Hopefully, my title would give her pause.
"Who's in charge?" she asked.
"I am." I stepped forward. "Princess Idrilia of Tarina. We're a research expedition. There were thirteen of us on the mountain when the avalanche hit. Two are presumed dead, most likely in the gorge. Three sustained serious injuries, and five minor ones."
If my title surprised her, she didn't show it.
"Commander Liora Pentell, Storm Wing, Tempest Squadron," she identified herself. "Did you trigger the avalanche?"
I hadn't expected the question. "No, we did not."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive. We were on foot, and we didn't operate any equipment or make any noise. In fact, we had just stopped for a few minutes when it started."
"Were you taking a break?"
"I was collecting a botanical specimen," I admitted, hoping she wouldn't ask which one.
I had no idea whether a commander in the Elucian Dragon Force had ever heard about the Silver Princess, but if she had, she might claim that it was a protected Elucian flower and demand that I hand it over.
"I see," she said. "You got carried away and climbed where you were not supposed to. But we will sort out the details later. What's the status of the more seriously injured? Can they ride?"
Sorel stepped forward. "I'm the medic. One has a broken ankle and a sprained wrist, the second has a broken collarbone with possible rib fractures. The third has a broken arm and a probable concussion. The concussion concerns me most. He's been drifting in and out of consciousness."