The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Fifteen

 "Does she do that often?" The dragon spoke the words as she watched Lina kneel beside her sister and touch her cheek. She had had a firm hold of her sister's hand, but had only managed to slow her fall and keep her from hitting her head on the hard floor. Lina stared at the creature before her, as she clung to Quara's arm and said the first thing that popped into her head.

"You speak but you don't speak. Your lips don't move."

"You're very observant, small one. Well, for the most part that is. I don't actually have lips. Or a tongue that could form the words of your language. I speak directly into your mind."

"And can you hear my thoughts?" Lina thought the words, but did not say them aloud. She stared at the dragon as she waited for a response. In the dim light, at the edge of the circle cast by the egg, she could see Ausfela, but couldn't really get a good look at her. She looked to be a dim chocolate color in the murky half shade.

"Only when you think at me. That is to say, only when you mean for me to hear what you're thinking. I can't just pick and choose among your thoughts and have a look. Most of the time anyways. Some people think loudly all the time, but as a rule most do not." The dragon bobbed her head ever so slightly as she responded.

Silence fell between them as Quara's eye lids began to flutter. After a moment her bright blue eyes opened entirely and she looked around, recognition flickering across her features as she realized that their adventure hadn't all been part of some nightmare and that she wasn't waking up, safe in her own bed.

"Can you hear me?" The dragon asked simply.

"Of course. I didn't lose my hearing when I fell." Quara rubbed her lower back, apparently emboldened by the fact that they hadn't yet been eaten by the large dragon who sat at the edge of the light circle watching them with jewel green eyes.

"She speaks into our minds." Lina said the words aloud, addressing them to her sister.

"I hadn't even noticed." Quara glanced at her sister and then her gaze returned to Ausfela. "But of course I can hear her. I answered her before I... fell." The older girl was reluctant to admit that she had fainted.

"You are small for a dragon, aren't you?" Lina let go of Quara's hand but stayed by her side as she addressed the question to the dragon. "I mean, I always imagined dragons like the ones in the books that were read to us at school. Dragons as large as mountains, they always said. Dragons that slept for a thousand years and snow fell on them and dirt blew over them and trees and brush even grew on them and people, in time, forgot that the mountain had ever not been there and built houses on them, only to find one day, after ten generations had lived there, that the dragon had awoken and was rising up into the sky." Lina regarded the dragon with her eyebrows raised because obviously such a thing could never happen to the small dragon who was flicking her tail back and forth, reminding Quara of an annoyed cat.

"No, such a thing could never happen to a Starseeker. It's not surprising that your people remember the stories of the Ancients. While they were never great in number their size made them unforgettable to the people in these virtually dragon-less lands. I am a smaller dragon, both because I am relatively young and because the dragons that I have descended from do not grow to a great size, even when we are adults. Although that isn't to say that we're very small. We aren't. Someday perhaps you will visit the far North Eastern shores of Za'Reek, where you can see truly small dragons."

"Those little things, well it's hard for me to even think of them as dragons, they can be such nuisances at times, but they are about as long as your arm when they're fullly grown. Their brains are tiny. They don't speak. To be entirely honest, I wish we could call them birds, because I think that they have more in common with birds than real dragons, but since they have scales and look like us, no one else will agree."