Draxus Flameheart's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

The trap under the eastern stair was real, but Draxus could not think past a smaller problem. He crouched in the underground chamber below the ruined hold. Two hatchlings tumbled at his feet—one crackling with lightning, one rimed with frost. He could not climb a cliff with them strapped to his chest. He could not leave them alone in the cold. Lyra was days south, rebuilding the hold. Ashara kept to her fire and would guard nothing for him. Kerra ducked through the low door. She was the elf who had found him half-starved weeks ago and taught him how to keep the young ones alive. She dropped a woven basket lined with green scales beside the straw. "For the ice one," she said. "Straw for warmth. Scales hold the heat." Then she pressed a hand to Draxus's chest. "Lightning one goes here, against skin. You knew that." "I can't take them up the cliff," Draxus said. "And no one's free to sit with them." Kerra sat back on her heels. "So we don't leave them with a person," she said. "We leave them with a guard the raiders can't buy or fool." She led him out into the wind. Past the hold's broken wall stood a barrow of black onyx stone, half-sunk in ice, carved with a dragon's snarling head. No scout would ever ride this far to search it. And a beast had made its lair inside. It came out low and fast—a wyvern with frost-dark scales and a tail like a spear of ice. It hissed. Draxus raised his warhammer, then stopped. "Don't fight it," Kerra said. "Show it the young." Draxus set the basket down between himself and the wyvern. He pulled the lightning hatchling from his coat and placed it in the straw beside its frost-scaled twin. The big wyvern stalked closer. It lowered its head over the basket. It sniffed. The hatchlings chirped and did not run. Draxus knelt and held out his open hand. "Guard them," he said. "That's all I ask." The wyvern's cold breath washed over his palm. It did not bite. It curled its long body around the basket and the barrow's mouth, a wall of black scale between the young and the wind. Kerra let out a breath. "It'll take them for its own clutch," she said. "Wyverns will. It'll kill anything that comes close." Draxus buried the ice hatchling deeper in the straw. He tucked the basket against the barrow's warm inner stone. The frost wyvern watched him with pale eyes and did not stop him. When he stepped back, it settled tighter around its charges. He had his guard. He could climb the cliff now. But he had left the two lives he loved most in the coils of a beast he'd met an hour ago—and he had to reach the hoard before the raiders sprang their trap, or he'd never come back to claim them.