Fate of Dragons

Chapter Fourteen, Part II

Fenn looked up from the letter on his lap with a pained look.

"She hasn't answered yet. What if something's happened to them?"

Eriya's shoulders slumped and she pushed her piece of rabbit too far into the fire. The tip of her stick jabbed into a log and it disintegrated into coals.

"Ack!" Eriya pulled the roasting meat away from the fire and spoke as she inspected it. "Maybe she's just still mad at us."

"I don't think she'd hold a grudge this long," Derol said to his two sullen young friends.

They sat around their own small fire in a camp site nestled among towering pines. It had taken them two days to reach the crossing over the border between Arethia and Yennar Lei. The trade road skirted the foothills of Arethia's southern mountains until those mountains turned into rolling hills. Then the road curved to join a river that drove south through a valley and into the great pine forests of Yennar Lei.

The train of wagons had crossed the border and kept going until the sky began to dim in the afternoon, and just when Derol began to worry that they wouldn't stop in time to make camp in daylight, the wagons turned off on a narrow fork and had come to this camp site.

It consisted of a small network of well-established clearings big enough for a wagon each and some tents besides. A stone-ringed fire pit occupied each one, too.

Although they hadn't yet traveled far from the Arethian borders, the entire group of Onami traders seemed to breathe easier now. Though Derol had his doubts about their true measure of safety—the Karume didn't seem to pay much heed to laws and borders—he couldn't help but feel a weight lifted from his shoulders, too. Part of it was the forest. He felt at home in it, though it was a stranger to him, really. Maybe his forest had sent word. He smiled to himself at the silly thought.

He gazed at the smoke that curled up from the fire into the trees. It was their first cooked meal since they'd left the Beetle's farm house. The wagon leader had assured him it would be safe to build a fire. Derol hoped so.

"What about Maira, and Torun?" He asked. "Will they be able to find us?"

Eriya glanced to Gypsy and Astrid, who trotted about at the edges of the camp while they waited for dinner to be ready.

"Maira seemed to think they could be of some use there, hiding in the caves and the high mountains. But she said they would come south to join us as soon as they could."

"I don't like it. It's dangerous," Derol said.

"A lot of things are dangerous, and there's no avoiding all of them," said Amina, who had just approached their fire.

Derol twisted around to see her, half smiling. She came toward the fire with a large bowl of rice from one of the Senemi families in the other wagons. She knelt and set it down on the wool blanket they had lain out for serving. A young Onami girl followed with another bowl, this one full of vegetables in some kind of sauce. She set it down, nodded to Amina, and returned to her own wagon.

"That smells delicious," said Fenn. He folded up the letter and tucked it in his pack, then picked up a plate from the stack on the serving mat.

"I still worry about them," Derol said, keeping to the topic of Maira and Torun. "They're the last dragon and rider left in Arethia, aren't they?"

"They are," Amina said. "And they can take care of themselves. They didn't get to be cave guardians for nothing. Besides, there's nothing we can do to help them now, anyway. Our task is to safely get the eggs to Yennar Lei. If we don't do that, their work is all for nought."