Rather Die Than Doubt

Chapter 21 The Scent

I wake to a pestering wind slipping its fingers beneath a corner of the blanket.

The draft doesn't feel cold, exactly, but it's not as wonderfully warm as the rest of me, and that's enough to pull me from sleep.

I come awake groggily, only to realize I have sprawled completely atop Marton at some point during the night.

My legs are tangle with his, my face buried against his neck, my mouth open and slightly damp with drool.

Equal parts embarrassed and horrified, I extricate myself from his arms with careful haste.

Both feelings—embarrassment and horror—spring from a notion that occurs to me at once: that I might have buried my face in his throat in the night because I wanted to be closer to his scent.

And I can't be sure if it was because I mistook him for a meal—horrifying—or because of some. ..other reason.

Some embarrassing reason.

Either way, it's a sign that getting too close to him is a bad idea. I wipe the drool from my chin and go about the camp making as much noise as possible to rid myself of the feeling of his body against mine.

Marton wakes a short while later in a positively buoyant mood. I'm suspicious of his attitude immediately. As he cheerful reignites the banked fire by prodding it with a stick, I squint at him.

Does he think he has won some great victory over me in our recent, silent battle? Because I put on the tunic and shared his blanket? Or is he truly this happy over a bit of cuddling?

No, I decide. This must be because he thinks he has bested me in some clever way. No one looks that delighted after a cuddle.

He offers to bake us an apple for breakfast, still smiling at me, and I make a noncommittal gesture as I refashion our blanket into a pack.

Marton laughs. And then he goes about slicing an apple in messy halves with a sharp stone and arranging the pieces to cook on a flat rock over the embers.

I've never had a baked apple before, but it's soft and sweet instead of being tart and crisp as it was before.

Like Marton instead of Tarah, says a sardonic part of my brain.

Excellent. Now even my sense of humor is betraying me.

I can't wait to get out of my human body and up into the sky. I turn my back to Marton as I strip out of my tunic and leggings, and I'm sure he politely looks away. I'm sure that he does, but a prickling sensation feels remarkably like eyes on my back as I pull the tunic over my head.

I ignore it, and the feeling goes away before I'm completely naked.

Once I am, I pace a few steps towards the ledge and shift into my dragon form.

The world changes instantly, becoming more about sight and smell and wind and wings.

I lift my nose into the wind, inhaling—and catch the scent of something at once familiar and alarming.

I don't immediately recognize the smell, but it makes my heart race with trepidation.

I sniff again, and the smell is gone, the wind pulling it away from me.

But when I search my memory for a trace of where I have encountered that scent before, I get an image of Cherry plummeting from the sky, of Vakhrin's body going limp, of a pair of black eyes and a pair of sapphire blue ones—both sets cunning and cold.

Wyvern. That's what that smell is.

I scan the sharp peaks of the cliffs and mountains around us, the green profusion of the forest below. But nothing moves except ordinary animals—birds and deer and rodents.

And that smell came to me on the wind, as if borne here from a distance. I turn my eyes in the direction whence it came, and of course, it is north. The direction we are headed. The direction of the Trove.

This evidence that we are going in the right direction should make me feel better—satisfied we are on the right track, pleased that we may get our friends back soon—but it doesn't. The last time I encountered wyverns, I lost the one thing I had dedicated my life to protecting.

The one person who loved me unconditionally.

And the first friend I ever made who was protectorkin like me.

Now I am headed straight for that danger again, and Marton is with me. The person who is... The person who I...

The person who I must protect now. The thought is not a complete one. I know there is more to the feeling than that, but I don't dig any deeper. Doing so could only make things worse.

But I do need to tell Marton what I have found.

I turn my head to face him, and he is just finished repacking our bag, kicking ashes over the embers of the fire once more. I bark a noise, flapping my wings once to get his attention.

He turns to me, eyebrows raised.

Well what now, genius? I ask myself. I forgot I couldn't speak to him in this form. And he's already packed my tunic away for the day.

I huff. Pointedly, I turn my nose into the wind, sniffing loudly. Then I turn back to meet his eyes meaningfully.

A smile dances in the corners of his mouth. "You smell something?"

I dip my head in nod. Then, feeling like a foolish chicken, I tuck my front legs into my chest and mime flying, moving my wings up and down gently so as not to actually take off.

I don't have much hope that he'll understand me, but the blood drains from Marton's face at once, his humor vanishing. "Wyvern?"

Another nod.

Marton's throat works, but eventually he nods. Shouldering the pack, he approaches me with a resolute expression. "Then we're headed in the right direction."

I understand his feelings, and his resolution, exactly.

So I lower myself to let him climb onto my back, and he scrambles up with practiced ease, settling into the spot between my shoulders.

His hands are cold on the warm scales of my neck, and he pats me a couple times, in comfort or to let me know that he's ready to go, I can't tell.

I push off the ledge anyway, diving into the rushing air, and we're born aloft on wind and wings, the sky coming down to meet us as we ascend. I fly high above the mountains that day, hoping to stay above anything else that happens to be in the sky.

But after a while of this, I have to acknowledge that it isn't the best plan.

I can't smell anything from up here, and I can't make out the finer details of the terrain beneath us.

If the Trove is not as blatant and recognizable from a distance as the painting we saw at the Academy, I might fly right over it and never know.

Or I might miss signs of dragons and wyverns in human form somewhere below.

And Marton has started to shiver from the cold, which must be biting at this altitude.

I coast lower in the sky, and Marton presses closer to my neck. For warmth, I imagine, or maybe he's studying what he can see now of the passing terrain.

By midday, it's a little warmer, and we fly comfortably for a few hours, taking only a single brief break for the human to stretch his legs and for both of us to eat. Then we continue north, and the air gets colder even before the sun begins to wane.

Every now and then I smell something interesting on the wind, but it isn't always wyvern. Sometimes, it's something wilder and harder to identify. Another type of kin?

I realize with some incredulity that I don't know exactly what a dragon would smell like. I've never met one, even in all our recent travels. And I couldn't very well say what I smell like. Would I recognize it in another, if I scented it?

I don't know.

I'm so lost in debate about it with myself that I completely miss the shadow that drops down on us from overhead as I skim above a mountain peak. Marton's hands tighten against my neck, and he raises his voice in a distressed shout that I don't get any words from.

I shake myself out of my reverie, and that's when I notice it. As the mountain begins to slope away below us, my shadow is not the only one on the ground. There is another, larger, overlapping over the back half of my body.

Panic explodes in my head as the shadow looms larger, dipping closer. In the same moment, another shadow flies in from the east, and I catch a glimpse of a big, winged shape in my periphery.

And then I'm diving. Tucking my wings in close, I execute a blisteringly fast plummet, following the sloping surface of the mountain down, down, down. I don't know what to do, how to get away from the shadowy forms pursuing us, but my primary thought is of Marton on my back. Exposed.

The shadow above me follows me pace for pace, and I lose sight of the other for a moment as I throw all of my attention into beating my wings, soaring faster.

It doesn't help. The second shadow reappears on my left, driving me to the right, around the base of the mountain. And the first shadow dives again, growing impossibly large on top of me.

Marton!

No time to think, I tuck my wings again, and this time as I fall, I throw my body into a roll. Marton goes flying from my back, and I twist around, grabbing him in both forelegs, wrapping them securely around him.

As I fall backwards for a brief moment, I get a glimpse of the shape above me.

And it is not a wyvern.

It is a dragon, with scales as green as mine, but brighter, more emerald and less olive. And it is over twice the size that I am. Larger, even, than Inobar was.

I twist back around then, facing the ground, ready to flap my wings and fly.

And the ground is ten feet from my face.

Marton cries out in warning, and I spread my wings in a wrenching, desperate move to catch us.

The air hits the membranes of my wings like a battering ram, hard enough to hurt and pull at the joints where my wings meet my shoulders.

Still, the ground comes up too quickly, and I peddle my back legs and beat my wings frantically to catch us.

But dragons are not made to balance on hind legs alone, and I go toppling forward as both winged beasts give bellowing cries from the sky behind me. If I fall on my front, I know Marton will be crushed, so I twist around again, folding my wings in as quickly as I can.

It still hurts abominably when I go crashing into the ground, the stone here at the foot of the mountain covered by only the thinnest layer of soil and grass. My spines and wings catch on every jagged rock and protrusion on the ground, and I'm thrown into a roll.

I brace my arms around Marton as my weight is temporarily on top of him. We roll and roll again, and keep rolling until my spine slams into the trunk of an oak tree strong enough to halt the momentum of my body.

The bark of the tree gives a remarkable crack as I slam into it, and it feels like something in my back does too.

But the tree is still standing—and with panic still a thrumming pulsebeat in my body, filling me with frenetic energy—in a moment, I'm standing too.

I claw and scramble into an upright position, opening my front legs to release Marton carefully onto the ground in front of me.

I keep all four of my legs braced around him, my head lowered over him.

He lies completely still for a moment, and with a sickening certainty, I know he must be dead. But a moment later, he stirs and groans, and his eyes open. Hazelly brown as the day I met him, only a little dazed. Relief makes me weak as he raises a hand to touch my face, gives me a trembling smile.

Boom.

Boom.

The earth shakes as two massive forms come in for landings in the sprawl of open ground separating the woods behind us from the upward slope of the mountain before us. I look up with a snarl already ripping its way out of my throat, and I see two dragons.

One is the large, bright green one I saw before. The other is the same size exactly, but a duskier green in color, almost gray.

For a moment, memory blurs this moment into another, and I am not facing two green dragons, but two blue wyverns. Not in the mountains, but in a valley. And I am about to lose everything.

That part is the same.

For a moment, it is excruciatingly and dazzlingly clear. Marton is everything, and these two want to take him from me. A snarling roar, more vicious than any sound I have ever made, tears out of me, and I know I will defend him with everything I have. No one will take him from me.

But my snarling ends eventually, and the foot of the mountain is tossed into a deafening silence. The two dragons across from me do not growl back, do not advance. They do nothing at all but watch.

Then the grayish green one makes a snuffling sound, grabbing the other's attention.

The two dragons share a look, and the bright green one nods.

Then he is shrinking down into the shape of a muscular, naked man.

He has black hair, yellowish brown eyes, and skin tinged even more obviously green than my own.

The man, with his gaze focused on me, puts both his hands up in the universal sign for I mean you no harm.

I don't move, not trusting this display for a moment. I stay braced over Marton, bunching my leg muscles in preparation for a lunge. If I need to attack, I will have to get over and away from Marton as fast as I can, to draw their attention away from him.

I can probably kill the one in human form before he has time to shift, and then it will be one on one. I can handle those odds, even if the remaining dragon is twice my size.

The man glances over his shoulder, saying something to his dragon companion. I tense. His throat is exposed, his attention diverted. Now would be the time to strike.

Do it, Tarah. Now. Kill him.

But the man turns back around in the next second, and I've lost my chance.

Then the second dragon shifts into human form as well, shorter and stockier and not as green as his companion, but otherwise remarkably similar. And I am facing two naked men, now making signs to show me that neither of them means me any harm.

I growl low in my throat. Fools. I'll kill them. I will.

I crouch, readying for a leap, and the shorter man's eyes flare with alarm.

He puts one foot back, as if bracing to run or fight.

A light touch to the scales of my throat pulls my focus, and I glance down to find Marton looking up at me urgently, propped up on one elbow.

He says something quick, and then looks over his shoulder at the men. Back at me, his eyes full of meaning.

Marton repeats himself. "They want to talk."