The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Twenty-Two

"Naiads."  Ausfela explained.  "And their hair isn't dyed.  It comes in all sorts of shades of turquoise and blue and sometimes even purple.  They weren't always on the friendliest of terms with humans and dragons, even water dragons, but this war has forced some unusual friendships upon us and after a few centuries, it doesn't even feel that unusual anymore."  Quara hardly realized that her fingers had undone the buckle on her harness and that she was about to swing her leg over to slide down off of Ausfela's back, when the dragon stopped her.  "You will regret that if your feet touch the ground.  I know that they hurt now, but they will hurt a hundred times more if you actually try to put weight on them.  Stay on my back for as long as you can. It's better this way.  And you can see Lina more clearly from up higher, at least for now."

Quara shifted her weight and settled back into the saddle, but she didn't buckle the harness again.  She wanted to be ready to slide down to the ground if her sister needed her, regardless of the red hot throbbing from the bottom half of her legs that came and went in steady waves.  Moments after entering the forest she was bent forward with her chest pressing against the cantle of the saddle and her arms protecting her face and head from branches.  She knew that it was far better for her up in the saddle than it would have been struggling down below through the underbrush, even with Ausfela clearing a path for her, but she still found herself wishing she could slide down the dragon's side and run ahead to walk beside her sister and make sure she was alright.

When she could lift her head, in places where the trees didn't bend their branches as if they were trying to block the path and turn back intruders to the island, Quara kept her eyes focused on the naiads.  They seemed to slide over the road with smoothly graceful steps, their every movement a sort of dance.  Lina, on the cot suspended between them, benefited from this immensely, since she lay quite still as they flowed across the land.  And it almost appeared that the trees leaned away a bit, out of their way as they moved forward, although they made no such efforts to help the dragon and her charge along.

The twelfth time a branch raked through her hair, Quara gave a small whimper of frustration, and Ausfela looked around at her to see if she was alright.  "The trees here know that they're to let the naiads through, but they aren't quite so bright that they realize that we're with them and so they give us the same hard time that they give everyone else.  Don't take it personally and try to keep your head down.  This island isn't all that large, so wherever they're taking us, we should be there soon.  And convincing them that we're friends, even with the naiads help, would take us far longer than we have at the moment.  Lina needs help from their healers now."

They came around a large bend, past several enormous groves of trees that gave Quara the distinct impression that they were standing guard and their eyes were met with a sight that seemed rather out of place. The ground had been rising steadily since they began their inland hike, with occasional dips and gullies here and there, but overall the path tended towards a gradual increase in elevation.  In the midst of the forest, hidden amid lush foliage, a wide, arching stone wall rose abruptly from the forest floor.  The face of the rock was entirely covered with rushing water and in the few places where the water was trickling there grew thick, lush moss.

Quara thought that the oddest part of the entire waterfall was the noise.  She had hardly heard it at all as they approached, but the moment she stepped into the clearing that surrounded the pond that the waterfall emptied into, the sound of the noisy stream made it nearly impossible to hear anything else.  Staring at the pond Quara tried to find the stream that drained the water into the larger lake that filled the crater, but after scanning the line of the water from one side of the waterfall, around the pond and back to the waterfall's other side, she found nothing.   She was just about to ask where the enormous amounts of water cascading down the rock wall disappeared to, when she saw that the naiads had walked around the right hand side of the water fall and stopped.  Both naiads turned and glanced at Ausfela and Quara, obviously waiting for the two slower members of their party to catch up.