Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons) (12 page)

“Impossible?” she
snorted. “Impossible for a Dragon to break a few chains and fly out of the Cloudlands? Don’t be silly, child.”

“I am not
a silly child!” Flames roared out of her mouth and shot up the chimney. “They threw me off the cliff–don’t you get that? You try it sometime! Try saying farewell to everything you know because you know you’re going to
die
.”

Aranya leaped to her feet, intending to storm out of the door. The room spun around her.

“Easy there, rajal.” Nak’s hand, surprisingly firm for his age, steadied her.

“Ooh, I don’t feel good.”

“You won’t,” said Oyda. “Not for a few days, you won’t. Come lie down in the back. You can ask me all the questions you want. You’ve landed among good friends, petal. That’s all you need to know right now. We’re friends.”

* * * *

Instead of asking her million questions, Aranya fell asleep and dreamed terrible, chaotic dreams filled with fire and burning and endless falling. Yolathion and Garthion merged in her mind as they flagellated her with burning whips. She saw Garthion standing over Zuziana and could only scream impotently as he peeled the skin off her body.

She awoke
shrieking, “Zip!”

Oyda appeared in the doorway with a taper to light the tallow candle in her room,
her hands covered in flour and bread-dough. “You slept forty hours, Aranya. I was getting worried.”

“A day and a half? No wonder I feel–well, like I was tossed off a cliff.” Aranya laughed hollowly. She tried to reach up to muss her tangled hair, and gave up with a hiss of pain. “I probably don’t smell too
good. I had a fever, didn’t I? Can I bathe in the stream?”

“Let me warm you some water and I’ll help, if you don’t object?”

Aranya tried to ease her shoulders. “Is it always this–oh, that kills–painful?”

“It
’ll heal. I’ll give you something for the pain.” Oyda placed a wrap around her shoulders and led her to the kitchen table. “You tore a few ligaments–no surprise, having dropped nigh a league off the Last Walk into the Cloudlands. Nak and I spent a few hours yesterday figuring out what we know about Dragon Shapeshifters. That’s what you are, petal. There are Dragons, Humans, and those who are both–Shapeshifters. Sit.”

Oyda ladled porridge into a wooden bowl and set the kettle on a tripod above the fireplace to boil water for redbush tea. As Aranya ate, she returned to kneading her dough.

Aranya did not want to think about what Oyda had just said–she wasn’t even Human? Oyda dealt in riddles as though they were facts, as though she saw life differently to anyone else in the world. Ten seconds awake and that sense of unreality lurked in the corners of the room, but it was somehow held at bay by the strange magic of Oyda’s hands turning and kneading the dough. Simple bread baking, the stuff of life around the Islands; emblematic of a new life that bubbled exuberantly in Aranya’s veins, life that grew and yearned and hurt and hungered, yet remained anchored in the old-as-time movements of a pair of hands shaping bread.

Aranya spooned porridge into her mouth as though it were her last meal–or
rather, her first after dying. Something within her had died down there in the Cloudlands.

“You’re in a remote area of Sylakia, twelve leagues and more from the capital,” Oyda said. “Back of us is
a thick forest most folks wouldn’t brave. You are welcome stay as long as you need, petal. Can’t say as Nak and I have many visitors. Don’t you worry about food or clothes. I’ve been sewing you a little something, if only to keep old Nak from pawing you. He’s a good man, my Nak, but a fool where women are concerned.”

“Thank you, but I can’t stay long.”

“Petal, Nak and I are in no danger because of your presence,” she said, reading Aranya’s thoughts effortlessly. “You should stay as long as you need to heal up and figure out what’s next for your life.” Oyda cut the dough and began to roll it out for braided rolls. “Nak and I can help, some. We both used to be Dragon Riders. Nak wants to teach you to fly before you plough up more grass than you did with your first landing, or break your neck.”

“
There are historical things you need to know. No Islander likes Dragons. It didn’t used to be that way. But neither Dragons nor Humans like Shapeshifters. Your kind were blamed for many of the problems that arose between Dragons and Humans. When we were young, Nak and I knew a lovely little Shapeshifter, an Onyx Pygmy Dragon called Pip.”

“A Pygmy Dragon?” Aranya echoed.

“Remind me later. I’ll tell you her story.”

Without being asked, she filled Aranya’s bowl a second time and
deposited a healthy dollop of rich yellow honey right in the middle of her porridge. “Something sweet for a treat,” she said. “It’ll put a pinch of colour in those hollow cheeks. Tea?” Aranya nodded. “Of course. Now, rule number one. Listen well. You need to feed both your forms. Dragons don’t eat often. My Amber Dragon, who was called Emblazon, used to fill up on a giant ralti sheep every couple of weeks or so. But he was fully grown. You’ll probably be juvenile size. I wonder what colour Dragon you are–oh, my sweet petal, don’t sigh like that.”

She had a thousand things to sigh ab
out, but what emerged was inane. “I have to eat sheep?”

Oyda chuckled heartily. “Meat, Aranya
–Dragons don’t eat flowers. More if you’re flying more. And more if you’re transforming often, I’d assume. We think transforming takes lots of energy, but we’re not sure. As best we know, neither of our Dragons were Shapeshifters. That’s the thing–folks can’t tell. That’s where the trust breaks down. There might be Dragons all over the Islands taking the form of Humans. Nobody would know. Neither you nor your father knew your mother was a Shapeshifter. Yet I judge from what you told us that she probably flew when she was pregnant with you. Do you want to hide this identity of yours, as she did?”

Aranya opened and closed her mouth. Her brain buzzed with so many thoughts that she lost her ability to speak.

Oyda poured the tea. “Rule number two: Dragons are not invulnerable. You can break your neck. Dragons can and do kill each other. Dragon hide is not impenetrable.”

“Dragons fight each other?”

“Oh, Aranya!” Oyda broke into peals of merry laughter. “Do rajals fight over a choice bit of meat? Do vultures squabble over a carcass?”

Aranya laughed along with her, although she did feel a pang of annoyance at having her ignorance exposed. But if it was true she had escaped by
changing into a Dragon–a ridiculous untruth if she’d ever heard one–then this was only the tip of the Island peeking out of the Cloudlands. She’d have to swallow her pride and learn whatever she could. She should play along until she worked out what had really happened to her.

“I apologise if my disbelief comes across as disrespect, Oyda,” she said stiffly.

“Petal … aye. Give yourself a little grace.” Oyda propped open the door of a round wood-fired oven Aranya had not noticed. She pushed the bread inside on a tray and swung the door shut. “Rule number three: What happens in one form has consequences for the other. If you injure yourself as a Dragon and transform, the injury will show up in your Human form too. Nak was very clear about that. He said he knew of cases where an injured Shapeshifter transformed himself only to die instantly in his Human form.”

“Oh.” Aranya puzzled over this. “Why?”

“Ask Nak. It’s something to do with volume. But don’t kiss him first. You’ll addle his already addled wits.”

Aranya laughed. “Like you haven’t already scrambled my brains into a sweet-tuber soup, Oyda.”

Oyda put her arms around Aranya and gave her a huge, floury hug. “Petal, I can only imagine how you feel. It’s like being born a second time. You don’t believe it now. Don’t you roll your pretty eyes, I see the disbelief writ all over them. Your new life has begun. Nothing will be the same–but you’ll soon understand when I say I am dreadfully jealous of this gift you’ve been given. I’ve always thought that being a Dragon must be an incredible, magical experience. You’ll get to fly. You’ll get to breathe Dragon fire. You’ll be able to wing your way to anywhere you want in this Island-World. And you need never be afraid of jumping off a cliff again.”

“I’ve always loved heights,” Aranya said. But she sounded as uncertain as she felt.

“Then be ready to spread your wings, my little fledgling.”

N
ak waved his
hands with great animation. “Behold, my pretty, I’ve brought you a wild ralti sheep for your first meal as a Dragon.”

“You’re wonderful,
Nak,” Aranya repeated, but her eyes kept straying to the seventy-foot furrow in the grass her first alleged landing had ploughed. Five days later, she was beginning to wonder if she had dreamed the whole thing. “So, what’s the plan? I transform into a Dragon and go chomp the sheep?”

Her sarcasm washed off him like water off a rainbow trout’s back.

“Just follow your instincts,” Nak said. “Dragon brains and Human brains are completely different. You’re going to have all kinds of strange thoughts and feelings. Imagine having two different female brains in your head, eh? One’s confusing enough, but two? How’d you ever make up your minds?”

“Nak, you’re an incorrigible rogue,” she offered, which was a guaranteed way to make him smile.

“No flying yet,” said Oyda, wagging her finger at Aranya.

Aranya eyed the sheep unhappily. Nak had tied it by a long tether to the ancient prekki-fruit tree. The sheep looked even unhappier than she did. Wild ralti were a lot smaller than the domesticated variety, but that still made for a beast that stood mid-chest to her. This male had curled horns, which made her imagine it could butt its way through walls. She did not want to tangle with the sheep.

“Stand back!” cried Nak. “When you learn to think with your Dragon brain, everything will just happen naturally.”

Ri
ght. Aranya closed her eyes. This Princess of Immadia was about to make a complete fool of herself. How did one transform into a Dragon? Think Dragonish thoughts? She and mutton were not on speaking terms at the best of times. She had lost count of the number of times she had pushed a chunk of mutton around her plate. Now might be an opportune moment to tell Nak she desperately wanted to be a vegetarian.

Oyda and Nak could be anyone’s grandparents, she thought. A few days
spent in their hut and she had grown inordinately fond of them already. Every time Oyda hugged her, Aranya wanted to cry. But they suffered from this persistent delusion that they had been Dragon Riders and she was a Shapeshifter. She’d asked a thousand questions and never once caught them in a lie. Now she was half-convinced they were right. Either they were crazy, or she was.

“Think of how you flew before,” Oyda advised.

“Think teeth, claws and a tail,” added Nak.

“Soaring gracefully over the Cloudlands, my petal
; seeing the beauties of the world through new eyes.”

“Rending the sheep tooth and claw,” countered Nak, scowling at Oyda. “Dragons are not soft and romantic. Except for thee, my peerless petal,
my flame, my sweet-bosomed muse.”

She had better transform before Nak fell prey to another of his urges.

Aranya closed her eyes and summoned the flying dream. After a while, the sounds around her seemed to fade. She placed a Dragon in the picture, as Nak had instructed her. Hmm … an amethyst-coloured Dragon. Something to match her eyes. Perhaps she was being vain, but Aranya did not want to summon any thoughts of the huge Black Dragon which had haunted her dreams. Too fearsome. Besides, she didn’t have any other colours in her mind.

This would never work anyway. What was she thinking?

Slowly, her head swivelled. She blinked hugely. What had she felt just then; trembling her world? A hiccup? A strange perturbation?

A terrified bleating came to her ears.
Prey.

Princess Aranya shifted forward on her belly. What was that witless sheep doing, frantically pulling at the rope on the far side of the tree? Sheep were not afraid of people.

Her eyes shifted. Minutiae smote her mind; the tooth-edged sword-grass swelling slightly with the first pollens of spring ready to be released from their tiny spiracles; the darting flight of a common sparrow into the forest behind the hut; the scent of prekki-fruit sharp and sweet on the wind, mixed with the evocative scents of a faraway land; the gentle buzzing of a dragonfly whirring down the stream, even the whisper-soft footfall of a meadow hare somewhere beyond her sight. Here were two small Humans looking up at her. One of them was dancing like a dervish.

Words came to her ears, slow and unfamiliar. It took her a while to process them, to realise that this was a language she understood.

“You’re a Dragon, not a worm,” screamed Nak. “Use your legs, stupid.”

Aranya tried to answer, but although her throat worked, no intelligible sound would emerge. She stared cross-eyed at the bump between her eyes, which resolved into a muzzle with two large
, scaly nostrils. Muzzle? She sniffed toward the sheep. A woolly, warm-blooded scent percolated into her mind. Saliva gushed into her mouth.

Meat.

She surged forward, chasing the sheep around the tree.

Bleating and jerking against the rope, the sheep managed to stay one step ahead of the enraged Dragon, who twice butted it with her nose while trying to figure out where her mouth was. Her wings,
flaring and flapping, sent pain shooting into her shoulders. She overran the sheep and fell heavily on her side while trying to turn about. Her head was completely in the wrong place, lashing about like an angry snake at the end of a ridiculously long neck. Fury thundered from deep within her chest.

Finally, she slashed with her forepaw, opening two bloody gashes in the sheep’s side. She raised her claws to her mouth. She pressed her digits between the surprisingly large fangs and tasted warm, metallic blood. The taste rushed straight to her stomach and ignited a gargantuan, all-consuming hunger. A roaring came to her ears.

She was roaring?

Dragon-Aranya, maddened beyond all reason by the sight of woolly meat bounding along in front of her nose, scuttled around the tree, then whirled and smashed the sheep with her tail. In a trice she was all over her prey, biting and growling and tearing and throwing back her head to bolt gobbets of meat. Chewing was superfluous. The mutton tasted like nectar in her mouth. It filled her stomach with sweetness. She sucked on its rich animal blood and slurped up the intestines with relish. This was a feast!
She guzzled and guzzled, filling her belly.

Suddenly, that pesky
male creature stood in front of her nose, shouting at her. Dragon-Aranya curled her foreleg around her prey and snarled at him.

“Aranya! Aranya!” he cried.

Aranya? Who was Aranya? Dimly, a memory came to her mind, a girl standing upon the battlements of a castle with her father, watching an invasion unfolding with full knowledge of what it meant for her people. She remembered the warmth of his love, the touch of his hands upon her shoulders and the deep sorrow in his eyes as he asked her permission to send her into exile.

Father!

That strange sense of disturbance came a second time. She swayed. Abruptly she was lower, much lower, kneeling beside the gutted carcass of a sheep.

She stared up at Oyda and Na
k with haunted eyes, gasping, “What have I done?”

“Magnificent! Stupendous! Mind-boggling!
” shrieked Nak. “What a Dragon. Such a thicket of gleaming fangs, and claws as sharp as daggers! Why, your haunches are as big and beautiful as an–”

“Nak,” Oyda
interrupted.

“
Breathtaking. Turned my bowels to water, you did.”

“Go deal with the sheep, Nak,” Oyda ordered.

Aranya accepted a blanket from Oyda and huddled into it. She let the old woman lead her back to the hut, where Oyda seated her kindly but firmly outside the door on a small stool. The noon suns-shine quickly warmed her scalp. In a trice, Oyda returned from the inside with a hairbrush and began to brush out Aranya’s hair.

She had been warned. But that
mindless eating frenzy–grotesque. Bestial!

She gazed at the sky, seeing nothing.

“I’m a beast,” she whispered. “A wild animal.”

After a long silence, Oyda said, “There are feral Dragons–crazed, unthinking Dragons, who have no rational capacity left in their being. I remember on several occasions Emblazon fought with feral Dragons to protect me. In one fight he lost the end of his tail. In another, the Dragon shredded
a good third of his left wing and we had to wait months for it to heal, even with his Dragon magic. But the majority of Dragons are not animals. You are not an animal. You are Aranya, Princess of Immadia, a young woman with heart and mind and a passion for life.”

The Princess of Immadia stared at the thoroughly butchered remains of the sheep. Nak was down there,
hacking off the last useable bits of meat with his dagger. Right now, her fire was as dormant as it had ever been. She had never imagined finding herself jowl-deep in a sheep’s stomach cavity and loving it. Was that savagery part of her? Truly?

“The reborn need to learn to eat,” said Oyda, making no bones about her practicality. “Dragons can eat with manners. Emblazon used to love cracking open the skull and licking out ralti sheep brains with his tongue. When I asked him to desist, he asked politely if he could continue the habit out of my sight. We agreed.
He never forgot.”

“You loved him? Emblazon, I mean?”

“I did.” Oyda sighed, her hands momentarily still in their task. “It’s different to Human love, or romantic love, petal. Romantic love is what I have for Nak. You see, when the crimson battle-lust comes upon a Dragon, they can lose themselves and become feral. A good Dragon Rider, or other Dragons, can bring a feral Dragon back. It’s like a temporary form of insanity. The deeper the bond, the more likely a Rider could bring back their Dragon. Sometimes loneliness will drive a Dragon over the edge. When Nak lost his Shimmerith, it broke him–snapped something in his mind, it did. You haven’t seen it yet, but he sometimes goes feral. Then I have to fetch my Nak from the woods.”

“So he had a female Dragon
… you had a male?”

“It’s most often the case,” said Oyda, working vigorously at a knot in her hair. Aranya rode the pain. It made her feel Human again. “Riders care for their Dragons. They heal them, protect them, give them companionship, and much besides. I think
that with Shapeshifters the relationships would more often be romantic. Sometimes a pair would both be Shapeshifters.”

“I’d find it very strange, having a Dragon Rider.”

Oyda chuckled at this. “I think I would too, petal. Now, shall I tell you a secret?”

“Surprise me.”

“Very well. Down there by the prekki-fruit tree, this old woman saw an amethyst-coloured Dragon. I’ve seen thousands of Dragons in my lifetime, but never an Amethyst Dragon. I don’t know what it means, Aranya. Reds, oranges and yellows are the most common. Although, most Dragons are extremely fussy about their precise colouration. Burgundy wing-struts with crimson undertones on a base of ochre underwing and belly–if you please.”

Aranya chuckled. “Oyda, I’
m suitably surprised.”

“I love that you aren’t just some plain old purple, which you don’t get amongst Dragons, by the way, but that your Dragon self is a gemstone colour with the quality and depth of your eyes.”

How strange, she thought. Fitting.

“I wonder what Zuziana would think of being a Dragon Rider?” Aranya mused.

“Are you an artist, Aranya?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

Oyda chuckled merrily. “Call it a lucky guess based on one hundred and seventy-six years of experience.”

* * * *

That evening, Nak sat Aranya down at the kitchen table and delivered an enormously lengthy lecture on hunting. The following day, it was a five-hour lecture on the mechanics of Dragon flight. Angles, wing flight dynamics when furled or half-furled or extended, using the air currents, landing, taking off, avoiding the huge quarrels of war crossbows and the payloads of war catapults, spitting burning meriatite at enemies, flying through storms, storming castles and using the tail to aid manoeuvring were all covered in a dizzying rush.

Then he had Aranya transform into her Dragon form and walk up and down the dell until she could manage that without falling on her face. Nak brought out a mirror so that she could see herself. Scary, she thought, curling back her lips in a Dragon smile. Oyda was right. Her hide was the colour of amethyst gemstones. She scratched herself pensively
. Weird. The person called Aranya stared back at her from the mirror with a Dragon’s slit eyes.

Something about this should feel right.
Instead, she just felt peculiar, and a bit frightened of herself.

Dragon-Aranya felt as though she were hiding inside a suit of skin. Ten feet o
f sinuous neck, twenty of body and another ten feet of spiny tail were bad enough. She held up her hands–but they were paws. She had weapons, not feet, with three strong digits and two opposable thumbs, all furnished with wicked purple talons that extended or retracted into their sheaths at a thought. Aranya walked in circles trying to see her tail and powerful haunches. Her gait felt bizarre, choppy and over-controlled by muscles which seemed primed to make her pounce, not prowl. Then she discovered that with her new neck, she could comfortably twist her head around to look at nearly any part of her that she wanted–and those parts were all Dragon. She flared her massive wings gingerly, but quickly decided to look at them another time. Her shoulders ached too much. Aranya examined the deeply striated muscles underlying her gleaming, scaly Dragon hide. Her flight muscles were enormous. She kept wanting to think of herself in Human terms of size.