Chapter 11 The Wyverns
My heartbeat thunders in my head, drowning out all other senses. Shift, shift, shift, my blood cries out, my dragon form pushing from below my skin, begging to be let free.
Seeing our hesitation to engage, the vicious blue dragon bares her teeth in a smile and begins lurching across the clearing towards us. She doesn't take to the sky, and her gait without four proper legs is slower and more awkward than a dragon's. Even so, she's hideously fast.
I turn to Vakhrin with my insides quaking like jelly, dragon incisors pushing at my human teeth, distorting my voice into a growl when I say, keeping my voice low enough that distant inhuman ears shouldn't be able to pick it up, "Stay with them.
Don't shift unless the others do." I jerk my chin towards the man and woman still in human form across the clearing.
This doesn't feel like a battle yet. This feels like a test, and I mean to pass it.
Vakhrin nods, and I take quick steps away from my friends, my form already bending and changing against my will. "Your dress!" I hear Cherry lament. Too late. My dragon form explodes out of me, and the scraps of my dress go floating away on the wind.
As the blue dragon—the wyvern—hurtles towards us, I heave myself into the air, spreading my wings to glide across the meadow on a low wind. I dive when the wyvern's path crosses mine, and she lunges upward at the same time.
We collide in midair with a clangor and scrape of scales against scales, and when we go tumbling back to the earth, I am on the bottom. Pain shoots through my pinned wings at the same time as the breath is knocked out of me.
I have only fought a manticore before, and this wyvern is much heavier.
It makes a new horrible sense to me suddenly, how I was able to pin Vakhrin and his grandfather both so quickly. Sheer size and weight have a lot to do with it.
But just like the manticore have their tails, I have a few extra appendages the wyvern isn't ready for.
When she pins my limbs with her own, I struggle enough to slip my wings free, hissing in pain as the delicate membranes pull.
When I feel them slip loose above my head, I bring the pointed horn tips of those wings down, hooking around for the wyvern's exposed eyes.
She drops her protective lids at the last moment, but one of my horn tips still catches her in the corner of an eye.
She bellows in pain, and her grip loosens.
I throw my whole body into a roll, dislodging her enough to slip through her hold. I shoot up into the air at once, my only thought that of getting away, gathering my bearings.
Something wraps around my tail, lodging between two spines. It gives a hard yank, and when my wings beat, I overbalance, and my upper body goes crashing back down to the ground.
The wyvern leaps onto my back, talons digging in, aiming under the scales around my neck. That makes me panic, and I thrash. I have never fought another creature that had scales of their own, that knew how to work against them.
I snarl through my teeth, rolling onto my back again, my wings trapped once more.
The wyvern grins down at me, and leaning close, she gives a snap of her massive jaws in the air above my throat.
I hear a human voice shout something, and feel the faint vibration of footsteps pacing slowly closer. The wyvern pauses over me, glancing up as the human voice speaks again. This time, I'm listening, too. "That's enough, Edythe."
Dragonish face evincing disappointment, the blue wyvern eyes me one last time, then heaves herself backwards into the meadow grass, landing on her feet and taloned wingtips. I roll to my feet more carefully, keeping my head low as I look up to see the voice that has spoken.
It's the strange man, with his bluish skin and the sense of wrongness wafting off of him.
This must be what it's like, I note distantly, for a human, when they look at me. It makes my skin crawl, and I don't know how my friends stand it. I feel a new sense of appreciation for the fact that they do.
But the man's black eyes are calm as he looks me over, and he offers me a polite smile.
Smoke huffs from my nostrils as I catch my breath, but I realize I never even thought about breathing fire against my opponent, and I don't think of using it now.
If the wyverns' scales are as impervious to heat as my own are, it wouldn't do any good.
And for me, fire as a weapon is always either a warning or a desperate last shot.
It is a horrific, gruesome way to kill.
The fact that it didn't occur to me to use it reassures me that I'm safe, more so than the smile of this stranger. Something in my body, maybe Vakhrin's touted sixth sense, tells me these people are not our enemies. Not yet.
The massive wyvern beside me shifts into her human form, and I get a flash of bare breasts, rounded hips, and white teeth as she laughs jauntily, springing through the tall grass to meet the older woman who holds out her dress. The young wyvern dons her shift with a sly glance at me.
I lift my dragon eyes skyward in an approximation of an eye roll, and the older man and woman chuckle.
They are all friendliness now, and I decide that that little confrontation just now was exactly what I thought it was before.
A test. And I passed, not by winning the fight, but by losing it.
They know what I can do now, and they must feel that they can beat me if it comes to a real fight.
And I don't know that they're wrong. The wyvern fought with practiced skill, like she had done it a dozen times before. Me, I have been battling soft humans for years, and I don't know anything about real battle.
The man says something to me that I do not catch, and I sigh to myself.
Better get this over with.
With a glance to find that my friends are approaching down the long slope of the meadow, I shift into my human form.
The three wyverns before me pay no mind to my nakedness. "I apologize for Edythe's exuberance," says the man with an easy smile. "She can be a little...eager sometimes."
"Only because it's so hard to find a real fight these days," Edythe sighs. Her eyes and her smile sharpen on me. "But you were good. For a novice."
I don't bother hiding my grimace. "How could you tell I was a novice?"
They all laugh at that, as if I've made a joke.
"You're young, for one," says Edythe. She angles her head to one side, sizing me up.
I resist the urge to cover my breasts. "Not that young, I suppose, but every year of experience counts.
You're no stranger to violence, I'm guessing.
You didn't charge in like an overeager cub, but you were ready for a fight quick enough.
I'll bet you've spent a lot of time around humans.
Used to being the toughest thing on two feet, I reckon?
" Her eyes travel behind me, to where my human friends draw nearer with every step.
I suppress my reaction at the accuracy of her assessment.
I don't like that I'm so easy to read. Not one bit.
All the same, I can't help but notice that the wyverns mostly keep their attention locked on me, as if I'm the only threat present.
My three companions they dismiss at a mere glance.
As if assuming they're all human.
I don't know if they can tell Vakhrin is a manticore. Maybe they've never spent time around any of his kind. I didn't sense, when I first saw him, the same sense of otherness I sense about the wyverns. Maybe that's an element of Dragomira that Chimera don't share.
If that's the case, we need to do all we can to hide that he's protectorkin. If it comes to a real fight, surprise might be our only advantage.
Trust, I remind myself feebly.
But...maybe not yet.
That sense of wrongness about them makes it harder for me to stomach trusting them than it was with Vakhrin.
It isn't fair, and it doesn't quite make sense.
These are people like me. I should be glad to meet them.
But the very nature that should draw me to them seems to be what repels me instead.
"I am Inobar," the man introduces himself, touching the lapel of his robes. "This is my partner, Besana." He gestures to the older woman, who nods at me. "And our friend, Edythe, you have met." Edythe gives another of her unsettling grins.
My friends reach us at that moment, and Marton rather blindly shoves a dress into my face, his own gaze averted. "Thanks," I say wryly, extracting the fabric from my mouth and moving to untangle it and put it on.
Cherry is holding several scraps from my ruined dress, and aiming a scowl in my direction. Trust her to be worried about my wardrobe after watching me battle a deadly wyvern.