Wings Of Honor: Heart of Ice

Chapter 9: Returning To The Rainforest

The healers' hut near the RainWing village was large, quiet, and sunlit, with curtains of green vines shielding the interior from curious onlookers. And there were plenty of curious dragons — ones Winter could see and ones he could only hear, murmuring and twittering like a council of invisible birds in the trees. The rainforest was starting to give him the suffocating, spine-crawling feeling that he was always being watched. He was, especially by me now.
Only RainWings were allowed to carry the unconscious prisoner. The killer. Glory ordered all the NightWings to stay away and sent Deathbringer to make sure none of them came looking for her. She also didn't object when Winter pushed his way into the pavilion and stood next to his sister, standing around defiant to their suggestions.
"I'm staying right here," he said.
"Understood," Glory said with a nod. She turned to survey the others as they edged through the curtain and stood back against the wall, out of the way. No one noticed the invisible scavenger with a rifle trained on the standing Icewing, the traitor.
"Your Majesty — how did you find us?" Moon asked hesitantly.
Glory glanced at Kinkajou, her scales shifting to starbursts of royal purple against deep blue.
"I left her a trail to follow," Kinkajou admitted, looking guilty. "Sorry, Moon — but she's our queen. I wanted her there in case we really did find Icicle." Moon nodded thoughtfully, looking back at the sleeping IceWing.
"I guess she's lucky you did." Grace congratulated her, looking from the outside.
Winter wanted to disagree, but he remembered something. Something important from the looks of it.
I was close enough. I could slip in, cut his bag, and nab his Skyfire. Hide it somewhere, not let any of the others give him theirs. I could get Grace to enchant them, tell Glory, to make them invincible like Turtle. I could shoot him right here and now. But a resounding peace came over me. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I swing to face it, but nothing was there. Suspicious, I turned back, not aiming, but holding ready towards him.
A pair of sky-blue RainWings were moving quietly around Icicle, cleaning her wounds. Another one, a pale pink, stood by her head with a blowgun and tranq darts at the ready in case she woke up. I was already thinking of all the uses I could make of them,
Icicle's chest rose and fell in long peaceful movements, and her face was as still as ever. The tortured expression was gone, for now. Winter hoped she would get a few hours of real rest before Scarlet came hunting through her dreams. That's another reason I'm staying, so I can catch her.
"It's odd," one of the RainWing healers murmured to the other. "Look how much this scratch has bled, Bullfrog."
"She wasn't letting herself sleep," Kinkajou told them. "She hasn't slept in four or five days."
Has it been that long?
The healers both made alarmed clicking noises with their tongues and bent over Icicle again, inspecting her more closely. "Why would any dragon do that to herself?" said the one named Bullfrog. "It's worse than refusing to eat. Another day of it and she'd probably be dead. At least she'll be able to heal now that she has to sleep."
"Going even twelve hours without sleep is one of my nightmares," said the other.
And I've gone longer. Horrible memories of a week of combat, sleeping in the open in a sleeping bag with my rifle on the front lines. Every rifle shot, we were up and positioned within seconds, waiting half an hour before returning to sleep. And we were interrupted every ten minutes.
"Remember that RainWing a few years ago who couldn't sleep? That was the saddest case I ever saw." Bullfrog shook his head and his tail turned a glum shade of gray.
"A RainWing who can't sleep?" Glory echoed. "Isn't that kind of like a SeaWing who can't swim?"
"It was worse than that," said the pink dragon. "He couldn't change his scales either."
"Because he couldn't sleep," said Bullfrog. "We figured out he had a snout deformity that kept him from sleeping for more than an hour at a time. But there was no way to fix it. It was awful."
Damn. Imagine sleeping in combat... but it's your whole life.
"He was awful," said the pink dragon. "Sometimes I would wake up from my suntime nap and he'd just be standing there staring at me. And he couldn't camouflage himself, and you could never tell what he was feeling by looking at his scales."
"Brrrrrrrrgh," said the other healer, shuddering from talons to tail.
"It's like he wasn't even a RainWing at all," said Bullfrog, earning a deserved scowl from me and Grace. "He was a lot grumpier than a real RainWing, too."
"So what color was he, if he couldn't change?" Qibli asked curiously.
"Kind of an ordinary lime green all over," Bullfrog answered. He held out one talon and shifted the scales along his arm to demonstrate. "Very boring."
"And unattractive," agreed the second healer. She gathered the damp leaves serving as bandages, stained with Icicle's crystal blue blood, before she bustled off.
"That's our cautionary tale of what happens when you don't sleep," said the pink dragon. "Ahem. Your Majesty."
"I do sleep," Glory protested. "Maybe not as much as other RainWings, but I've been doing suntime every day, no matter how busy I am. So quit your scolding, Jambu."
"I'm just saying." Jambu resettled his wings, looking pleased with himself. Me and Grace shook our heads.
"What are you planning to do with my sister?" Winter finaly asked Glory. "I can take her back to the Ice Kingdom. I promise Queen Glacier will see that she's punished."
Glory circled Icicle's bed, studying the sleeping dragon. "She's too dangerous," said the queen with a flick of her tail. "She killed one of my subjects —"
"On the way to killing you," Kinkajou interrupted to point out. Very nearly being tossed out herself, I felt. Glory waved this away with one talon. "I can't let her just fly out of here," she said to Winter. "I need to be a true queen to the NightWings, and that means letting them see justice. But I also don't want to start a war with the IceWings, and I believe a queen should have a say in what happens to her subjects. So I'll send for Queen Glacier, and together we can decide what happens to Icicle."
That was more fair than Winter could have hoped for, and yet it made his stomach twist in a painful, anxious way to think of his queen coming here to judge him and his sister. He thought something.
"In the meanwhile" — Glory sighed — "we'll have to keep her tranquilized so she doesn't try to escape or hurt someone else."
What? Grace eyed me with concern.
"Wait, what?" Winter rose to his feet and got his wings caught in a woven-leaf hammock that was hanging from the ceiling. He wrestled it off with a growl of frustration. "I need to talk to her."
"And I need a decent prison," Glory said, snapping her tail back and forth. "The RainWings don't have anything. Where am I supposed to put misbehaving dragons?" She turned to an older RainWing who was sitting in the corner, watching with stately composure. "Has no RainWing in history ever required punishing?"
"We don't imprison, we banish!" said the older dragon with an elegant shrug. "What could be worse than being thrown out of the rainforest?"
"You see what I'm dealing with," Glory said to Winter. "I have one prisoner right now — a NightWing — and we basically had to stick him in a quicksand pit. Every few hours his guards haul him out just enough so he doesn't die, and then he starts sinking again."
Well that's cruel and unusual.
They don't have the Geneva Convention here Grace.
They should.
"Yuck," said Kinkajou. "But he deserves it, actually." A Nightwing named Masterming I gleaned from a few thoughts. Leader of the Nightwing experiments that kidnapped Kinkajou. I was suprised she didn't react with more hostility.
"And there are two others I should deal with, but Queen Thorn has agreed to keep them in her SandWing prison instead, until I decide what to do with them." I couldn't help but notice Glory's sloth poked its head out from behind the queen's shoulder, climbing slowly up her neck. "I'll figure out something else eventually," Glory resumed, unfazed. "But I'm guessing Queen Glacier wouldn't appreciate it if I stuck one of her dragons in quicksand, so I'm afraid Icicle has to stay asleep for now."
Me and Grace unsettlingly nodded.
"Your Majesty," said a peach-and-plum-colored dragon, poking her head through the curtain. "Deathbringer would like a word."
"Excuse me," Glory said to Winter with a small bow. The older dragon followed her out, leaving Jambu on guard and Bullfrog still gently cleaning Icicle's scales. Winter inspected Icicle's face with concern. A small furrow had appeared between her eyes — was she speaking with Scarlet at that very moment? I couldn't hear anything.
We watched her for a long minute, but she didn't move or speak or give any other clues of what her dreams might be about. Maybe about Halestorm?
Finally Winter turned and stalked to the wall where Moon and Kinkajou were sitting together, their tails entwined. Grace was poking her head through the door next to them. Qibli was pacing around the healers' pavilion, poking his nose around curtains to see the other patients, sniffing piles of medicinal leaves, and scaring clouds of small yellow butterflies out of the rafters.
"Now what am I supposed to do?" Winter hissed at him. "It was your bright idea to come here. But I'm no closer to finding Hailstorm and it's my fault my sister's been caught by a bunch of RainWings."
"We are closer to finding Hailstorm," Kinkajou objected. "We've found the only dragon who's spoken to Scarlet and knows the whole story."
"And she's fast asleep," Winter said. "Which does me any good how?"
Qibli stopped next to Moon, brushing her wings with his. Winter's claws twitched and he clenched his jaw.
The other RainWings weren't paying any attention to them, but Qibli lowered his voice anyway. "Didn't you say you overheard Icicle and Scarlet conspiring?" he asked Moon. "Does that mean you can get into dreams, too?"
Winter recoiled. Like a shock like lightning ran through Winter's veins as he realized. "Is that true?" he demanded. "Can you listen in when Scarlet finds her?"
"I will try," Moon said, leaning a little closer to Kinkajou. "I am trying. It's all darkness in Icicle's mind right now — she's too deep in sleep for dreams." Grace nodded as well, closing her eyes to listen. I frowned.
I don't think that's how dreams work?
Winter stepped back a tad, thinking of something that incriminated himself. Likely what he told to his sister about killing Glory. He looked like he was ready to bolt. No, not on my watch. The healers diddnt notice three tranquilizer darts missing, and a makeshift cup launcher from a small sheet of metal secured with duct tape, to which I affixed to my pistol. I loaded one shell with just powder, held in place with a leaf. It only had to work once.
"So we wait," Kinkajou said. "For Scarlet to come."