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Berenel's service was going to release this particular captive on some unknown
elven lad's say-so.
Because they still hadn't managed to get an answer they understood
from Shana about where her tunic had come from.
She just didn't have the words, the language, for one. But more
importantly, she obviously believed that her "friends" were of the Kin, and
she couldn't understand why they kept asking the same question about her
tunic, over and over. Shethought she was being asked who the skin was from.
She told them. She told them any number of times.
They thought she was mumbling gibberish, and began treating her as
simpleminded.
He still didn't know what he was going to do. He had to do something,
but what?
Then, in the moment between one breath and the next, the question was
taken out of his hands.
The cloudless blue sky above was split with a high-pitched roar that
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was like nothing he'd ever heard before. He, along with every other living
creature in the caravan, looked up.
Diving out of the sky in a stoop, shrieking as she dove, was his
mother. He knew her immediately; how could he not? It was easy enough to
recognize her.
She was in pure, unadorned dragon-form.
She pulled up with asnap of wing-membranes at the last possible
moment, cutting across just above the heads of the grel-riders. She gained
altitude rapidly, readying herself for another stoop. Keman was tailmost
today; he froze in pure astonishment, legs locking but that wasn't what anyone
or anything else in the caravan did.
The grels, one and all, decideden masse to bolt, as Alara circled
around for the second dive. Keman, standing stock-still, was unprepared; he
was braced and the grel in front of him was leaping away the tether snapped
with a whip-crack sound, leaving him standing alone in the middle of the road.
Alone, because the men had taken to their heels as well; some scattering over
the fields, looking for somewhere to hide, and some belting after the
vanishing grel.
." Mother!: Keman called, as she began her second stoop..-Mother,
stop! Mother, you have to  :
Either she couldn't hear him, or had no intention of heeding him. The
result was the same, either way. As she plunged towards him, he saw her
foreclaws out, saw that they were padded.
Too late, he tried to make a run for it.
She hit him with enough force to knock the wind out of him, and
snatched him up with her hindclaws, all in a single, smooth motion. And with
him firmly caught in her claws she proceeded to gain altitude and distance,
taking him farther and farther away from Shana, ignoring his protests
entirely.
Shana was black-and-blue from head to toe. Grels, it seemed, were not
smooth runners. Shana had been bounced around on the back of hers until she
thought she was never going to sit comfortably again.
When the caravan stopped to allow the men on foot to catch up with
them, she looked about herself, puzzled. Alara hadn't actually hurt
anyone she'd only launched a teasing raid on the train. The worst she'd done
was to carry off one of the pack-beasts. That was nothing more than a basic
prank among the Kin.
Befuddled as she was, she couldn't imagine why they were so genuinely
terrified of a simple dragon in stoop, and a trick-raid.
She struggled with her straps, while the men straggled in, winded and
weary. The more she fought the soft leather straps, the more alert she felt.
Finally she freed herself from her straps, and slid down off the back of the
grel. She looked for Kel or Ardan, but all she saw were the drovers, sitting
or lying on the ground in postures of profound exhaustion.
They weren't going to help.
She started to wander off, hoping to find someone to explain it all
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to her.
Thatwas when her "friends" Kel and Ardan appeared, suddenly changed;
they grabbed her before she could get too far, as if they were afraid that she
was going to run away. When she tried to wriggle free of them, Kel hit her.
She hit back; and kicked and bit, for good measure. That was enough
to trigger a full-scale fight. She screamed and clawed and kicked with
everything she had, but they were much bigger than she was.They kept trying to
pin her to the ground, and never uttered a sound except when she kicked them
especially hard.
She was convinced that both Kel and Ardan had gone mad.
Finally they subdued her by the simple means of tripping her and
sitting on her.
While she continued to fight, they kept her pinioned.Now they began
to talk, and it made no sense. Kel produced rope and they tied her hands
together, then threw her on the back of her grel and tied her hands to the
saddle and her feet to the stirrups, all the time babbling about the "monster"
that had attacked them.
Now that they had run themselves into exhaustion, the grels had
quieted. As Shana clung miserably to her saddle, the caravan plodded or
rather, staggered towards the gates of the city in the distance. And at the
sight of that city, its high walls, its thousands of inhabitants, a terrible
and frightening realization came to her. Because there weren't that many [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]