Fate of Dragons

Chapter Five

Try as he might, Derol never found a ship that would take responsibility for getting the letters all the way to Areth. Instead, he was forced to find passage on one. They crossed Great Lake Morna to the city of Galeth on a lumbering wooden sailing ship heavy-laden with cargo. When they arrived at the outpost in Galeth, they learned that the dragons had just gone from there, too. But the people at the outpost were welcoming and there was no sign of the Karume. They stayed the night and got their bearings, then left on the south road toward Areth. After several days' more travel, they'd come to the flat plains, where mountains loomed in the distance. The mountains that were home to the city of Areth.

For the longest time, the mountains seemed to remain the exact same distance away from them. He tried to remember if his mountains had behaved the same, leaving Enval. Each day Derol thought they'd get closer, and each day they made camp with those mountains sitting there, exactly the same distance they'd been that morning.

They met others on the roads. Traders in wagons, merchants in small bands, families on foot or on shared horses. He and Astrid fit right in. They looked like a father and daughter, riding together on Daisy's back, and if anyone said it, Derol didn't correct them.

As far as he could tell, none of the towns on the south road had been occupied by those mages yet, but some of the families he'd made camp with whispered about their towns, how they'd come and taken charge, quiet and quick, just like Enval.

Derol related his own experience, and began to have a hunch. Each time he encountered someone who talked of their town being taken over, he asked where it was. Without fail, all of them were border towns. All in the east. Then Derol finally encountered someone from a border town in the west, out over the plains. That was when his stomach really began to twist up in knots. If they had all the borders, what next?

From time to time a dragon would pass over, always headed toward Areth, never away. Derol felt comforted to see them in the sky patrolling, but then thought of the outpost in Mirella. Did mages lay in wait for the dragons to leave at each one?

One day, they were on the outskirts of the farmland that surrounded the city of Lower Areth. Derol finally felt like there was an end in sight. He looked up as a shadow passed over. Behind him, Astrid clapped and laughed, bouncing in the saddle. It was a dragon flying overhead. Another shadow passed, and another dragon came into view. Then another dragon. Three, all told. It was the most they'd seen since they'd been traveling.

"Three dragons," Astrid crowed, clapping even more. "I want to see so many dragons in Areth," she said. "Will Tesa let me pet her dragon?"

"I'm sure she will if she can," Derol said.

"Did you see the green one? I want a green one," Astrid said. "When I get big I'm going to have my own dragon and we're gonna fly in the sky." She made a whooshing noise and Derol could see her hands mimicking the movements of flight in the corners of his eyes. He smiled and didn't bother explaining that nobody could simply choose to have a dragon.

"We're almost there," he said instead. "See the buildings? Just past those and we can go up the mountain." He was relying on information that had been passed on to him by fellow travelers, just the same as he'd relied on tips to find their passage across great Lake Morna. Some had said it would be better to sell the horse and get another on the other side, but Derol had refused to part with Daisy.

Once again, though, the real distance to the buildings ahead was farther than he perceived, and they found themselves out in the middle of waving grassy hills as night set on them.

"Guess we'll have to camp out here," Derol said, pursing his lips. He was standing off to the side of the road in a flattened area of grass next to the river, which wove alongside of the road. Derol made a fire in the dug-out pit that was already there, and set to preparing a rabbit they'd caught along the way. Astrid poked at the fire with the stick she'd used to roast her pieces of rabbit.