Dragon's Bait by Velde Vivian Vande

Author:Velde, Vivian Vande [Velde, Vivian Vande]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2003-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

IN THE DARK ALLEY behind the church, Selendrile resumed dragon shape so the two of them could leave Griswold without having to wait for the gate to open in the morning.

“Try not to pull my arms out of my sockets this time,” Alys grumbled. With her back to him, she couldn’t tell whether he’d already changed into a dragon and couldn’t answer or if—still human—he simply chose not to.

In another moment she felt his talons wrap around her waist, enclosing her. She felt a twinge of panic and dug her fingers tighter into the bundle of his clothes, but she didn’t have time to shut her eyes before her feet left the ground.

With slow, powerful beats of his wings, Selendrile carried her up, higher than the town walls, higher than the trees, higher than the church steeple. At first she was disoriented, looking down on everything from the air, trying to make sense of half-familiar streets and buildings dimly lit by candles and torches and hearth fires, till her eyes began to cross and dizziness bubbled up in the space behind her eyes. As soon as my stomach catches up to the rest of me, I’m going to be in serious trouble, she thought.

But in another moment they’d left the town behind and were in the countryside and higher yet. Now the ground was too far away and too unreal to be frightening. Selendrile stretched his wings to catch an updraft, and fields and woods unrolled beneath them as he glided effortlessly on air currents. His grip around her waist was firm without being painful, and steady enough that she didn’t worry about slipping loose. At the speed they were traveling, the rush of the wind past her ears was deafening. Still, by the time she saw that Selendrile was getting closer to the ground, she suddenly realized how disappointed she was at that thought. She laughed out loud at herself, and the sound was strange to her ears and, a moment later, was left miles behind.

With her feet once more on the ground, Alys again found herself dizzy, but this time it was a giddy, pleasant sensation. She let Selendrile’s clothes drop to the ground so that she could hold her arms out and spin around, with her face up to the stars, wishing she could hug them to herself. “That was wonderful!” she announced. “I love flying!”

She let herself fall to the ground and lay on her back watching the sky spin above her.

When things were finally standing still in their proper places again, she pointed up to a dark wisp of cloud shrouding the moon. “Next time”—she giggled—“if there is a next time—wouldn’t it be fun to fly through a cloud—like diving into a big pile of unspun wool?”

Selendrile sat down beside her to pull on his boots. “You can’t feel them.”

Alys rolled over and propped herself up on an elbow. “What do you mean? Are they too high up for you to reach?”

He shook his head.

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