Lyra Thornwing's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Lyra left the barn before dawn with a small blue diary in her satchel and a lantern in her hand. She had one day to learn what else might keep the wyvern eating once the fairy-dragon was gone. She rode to the ridge where she had first found him, half-starved among the rocks. She meant to read the ground again, slower this time, and write down anything she had missed. She found the old scuff marks near the fallen pine and knelt. Then she saw the second print. It sat a pace off from the first, deeper in the heel, wider across the toe pads. She opened the diary and sketched both tracks side by side. One was her wyvern. The other was larger. She followed the second trail up the slope, past a snarl of blackened wood where sap had eaten the bark from the inside. Venom stains dotted the twigs. Something had fought here, or bled here, and not long ago. The trail climbed for an hour and ended at a cave mouth ringed by old carved stone. The markings were half-eaten by weather, but she knew them from her books. A wyvern had claimed this place long before her wyvern was hatched. She crouched behind a boulder and listened. Voices. Two men, low and careful, arguing about rope length and the price a live wyvern would fetch in the southern markets. She saw their gear stacked by the entrance: chains, a muzzle, a covered cage on a cart. She understood then. The fight on the ridge had not been between two wild wyverns. It had been men trying to net the pair. The larger one, the mate, was still inside the cave, cornered. Her wyvern was the one who had broken free and dragged himself down the mountain to her fields. She wrote it in the diary in three quick lines. Then she backed down the slope, mounted her horse, and rode hard for the nearest ranger post. She named the poachers' location, the cart, the chains. She said a protected creature was inside. The ranger sent three riders within the hour. By dusk the men were in irons and the cave was quiet. Lyra stood at the entrance and looked in. The larger wyvern lay in a woven mass of branches at the back, breathing shallow, one wing torn. It was not a nest she could move. She could not bring this creature to her barn, and it could not survive alone in the state the poachers had left it. She closed the diary against her chest. Her wyvern was not lonely for a fairy-dragon. He was lonely for the mate still bleeding on the cave floor, and she had until morning to decide what to tell the court about two wyverns instead of one.