3. What burns bright
3
WHAT BURNS brIGHT
They weren’t moving fast enough to escape their pursuers.
Anahrod had to lead the group through any hazards and also swing back to cover their tracks. Ris and Naeron might have Deeper ancestry (Ris) or even come from the Deep (Naeron) but neither understood jungles.
If Anahrod had more time, she would’ve taught Claw, who had the right mindset, the right eye for detail. Unfortunately, expecting someone who’d lived her whole life at fifteen thousand feet or higher to learn all the skills necessary in minutes was a mountain too high.
Every time the Skylanders opened their mouths, Anahrod would snap at them to be quiet.
Something was wrong. Something was missing. Eventually she realized that the missing something was the drumbeat rhythm of Overbite’s heart, the counterpoint tempo of her light footsteps on the jungle floor. Anahrod had grown so used to the noise that its absence left a painful wound.
But it wasn’t only Overbite’s absence that splintered fault-like through her perceptions.
Wind stirred through jungle canopy leaves overhead. Wild animals screeched, screamed, and vibrated the ground with their calls. The soft background roar of the distant ocean tide alternated between quiet and deafening. All around her lurked the scent of earth, greenery, flowers, and the faint, sharp smell of something oily and acid.
She stopped.
“What’s wrong—” Claw said.
Anahrod held up a hand. “Quiet.”
The Skylander was about to make a fuss, but Kaibren took the woman’s arm. She fell silent.
Absently, Anahrod wondered who was minding who in that relationship.
Something approached. Either a herd or…
She touched the minds of rock wyrms.
They were close. Far too close. The Scarsea had either seen through Overbite’s distraction or Sicaryon’s sheer numbers made it irrelevant.
“What’s going on?” Ris whispered.
“Is your dragon nearby?” Anahrod asked instead of answering the question.
“I don’t see how it matters,” Ris answered. “If there were gaps in the canopy large enough for him to fit through, he would’ve done it already.”
“I don’t want him to land. I want him to roar at my signal. A hunting dragon will scare rock wyrms. Some instincts will be too strong for a pride to ignore.” Anahrod pointed to a tree with thick branches and plentiful foliage. “We’re climbing this right now.”
“We are?” Gwydinion asked, a weak and perfunctory protest.
Claw had already looped rope over a branch, using it as a guide to help the two older men.
The Skylander women helped Kaibren and Naeron up the tree with respectable speed before following themselves. Gwydinion scrambled up the rope as Anahrod made one last-ditch effort to hide their trail. Then she followed, yanking the rope up after her.
“What are we—?” Gwydinion whispered.
Anahrod clapped her hand over the boy’s mouth as the rock wyrm pride loped into view.
The tree where they sheltered grew from a tangle of bushes. A normal clustering of jungle plants conducted the world’s slowest botanical war as they made alliances, hoarded resources, and took advantage of every gap in the canopy. The rock wyrms didn’t have enough room to stand underneath them. Which was good, because this pride all had riders, each wearing the violet body paint of the Scarsea.
Like Scratch and Braids, these wore little armor (because it was too hot for such nonsense without inscribers). However, the way they wore their belts, shoulder plates, and accessories showed a marked consistency. A uniform. Sicaryon’s symbol, a blue wave on a violet background, was embroidered in multiple locations, including belt buckles and jewelry.
He really is trying to make himself a king . Anahrod swallowed a sour taste.
He’ll likely succeed, too.
The riders were heading in the wrong direction. If luck was on Anahrod’s side, the riders would continue until they met up with the group tracking Overbite, at which point Anahrod would have the good fortune of never seeing them again.
If she was less lucky, these riders were performing sweeps.
Unfortunately, her luck proved even worse than that: the riders stopped around thirty feet away to rest. Close enough that the wrong snapped twig, the wrong glance at the wrong moment, would reveal their position.
She watched for any sign that this was anything other than a break to relieve themselves or feed their wyrms. It didn’t seem to be; the men and women laughed and told each other jokes. Her suspicion about bodily functions was proven correct when one of the men wandered off to a tree nearby.
Something dropped from above and hit a rock on the jungle floor with a loud metallic clang. Whatever the source, it was man-made, and in the Deep, such sounds carried.
The Scarsea stopped all banter and joking as they searched the area. If they were competent—and there was no reason to assume otherwise—it wouldn’t take long before they remembered to look up.
Anahrod grabbed Ris’s hand. Now, she mouthed to the woman.
A flicker of confusion shone on Ris’s face, gone so quickly it might have been a trick of light. Then she closed her eyes.
A dragon’s roar echoed over the jungle treetops, loud as a roll of thunder.
If the Scarsea had come to attention at the small noise before, that was nothing compared to their reaction now. The rock wyrms panicked; two snapped their leads and started running. The soldiers shouted, trying to force their rides back under control. Those with mounts grabbed those without before they raced off into the jungle, chasing after fleeing wyrms.
[Need anything else, my dear?]
How many years had it been since she’d heard a dragon speak? Too many. And not nearly enough. This one was different, though.
She’d never heard a dragon be so solicitous.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Ris leaned back and shoved Claw off the tree branch.
“What was that for?” Claw rolled up again to her feet, cursing.
Ris jumped down as gracefully as though stepping off a stair riser. “Do you think I didn’t see what you did?” Ris’s voice was ice cold.
“My hand slipped,” Claw protested.
Ris scooped something up off the ground as everyone else climbed down.
A knife. Specifically, one of Claw’s knives.
Ris examined the blade with a critical eye. “Do you think I’m stupid?” Her voice was soft.
Claw’s sullen expression disappeared, replaced by fear.
Anahrod glanced back at the others. Kaibren’s face showed nothing but concern. He seemed about to jump between the two women, regardless of the personal peril. Naeron muttered under his breath as he tapped two fingers against a wrist, counting his pulse.
“I could’ve taken them,” Claw said. “We were safe as hatchlings.”
“It’s not about your capabilities.” Ris shifted the knife in her hand. “It’s about your willingness to follow orders.” She now held the knife in a grip suitable for throwing.
Claw stepped backward, shifted her hands toward her daggers. “Are we really going to do this? Here?”
Ris threw the knife.
Most people underestimated the difficulty of throwing a knife. Achieving anything other than bouncing a knife handle off one’s target required precise control and timing. This knife, however, struck true.
It also didn’t hit Claw. Ris had thrown it into the tree to Claw’s left. The blade sank fully into the trunk, making it effectively impossible to recover.
Ris had either used magic, or she was far stronger than her delicate appearance suggested.
“No, we won’t do this here,” Ris agreed, “but disobey me again and I won’t be so forgiving.” She walked away.
Anahrod contemplated what she’d just seen. It’s not like she’d have been brokenhearted if Ris had injured Claw. Anahrod was mad at the bloodthirsty little killer, too. As far as she could tell, Claw had tried to pick a fight just to sate her boredom.
If Anahrod had any doubts that Ris was a dragonrider, that little demonstration settled the matter. Dragonriders weren’t in charge, but they acted as voices for the ones who were—dragons. That combination inevitably resulted in a group of people used to throwing their weight around.
“I’ll be right back,” Anahrod told the group, although only Naeron nodded at her to show he’d been paying attention.
She returned to the tree they’d just abandoned and started climbing. No one protested. She suspected they were too distracted by Ris and Claw’s showdown to notice.
The jungle spread out in a confusing, dense welter of trees, vines, and choking plant life, too crowded and chaotic to provide useful information. Anahrod didn’t dare stay up there for more than a few seconds, either. The tree branches were too thin, the predators too many. This close to open sky, blood crows waited for any opportunity.
She only needed a glimpse.
Anahrod found what she was seeking. An area where the trees changed in texture, turned dark-leafed and violet. The canopy was as dense as the foliage at her current location, but composed of fewer, larger trees.
She clambered back down. When she reached the bottom, she said, “If you two are finished, we’re heading northwest.”
“What’s in that direction?” Gwydinion asked.
“A swamp.”
“You’re going to hide our tracks in a swamp?” Ris asked.
Anahrod shook her head. “No. Our tracks won’t matter. The Scarsea won’t follow us.”
“Is that who’s been chasing us?” Gwydinion asked. “The Scarsea?”
“Who cares?” Claw commented. “The real question is: Why wouldn’t they chase us in there?”
Anahrod started walking, but she turned back to answer. “Because the Scarsea aren’t suicidal.”