Lief crawled to his feet. Terrified and leaderless, the Granous pack had fled. The Capricon lay motionless in the dust. Only Barda and Jasmine remained standing in the clearing.
They staggered over to Lief, and the three clung together for a moment, deeply shaken.
‘The dragon,’ whispered Jasmine at last. ‘It broke through the forest canopy, and came …’
‘It was the Belt,’ Lief said. His voice sounded hollow and strange to his ears. ‘The Belt called to it.’
As he spoke, he looked up. The topaz dragon was perched on the top of the next hill, like a bird on a tree. It was eating.
Lief shuddered.
‘Do you think it will come back?’ Barda muttered. ‘Perhaps we should—’
On the ground at their feet, the Capricon stirred and moaned. Jasmine knelt down beside him.
‘We can do nothing until I have bandaged his wound,’ she said. ‘He has already lost much blood. It would be a pity if he died, since we nearly killed ourselves to save him.’
Calmly she inspected the injured hand. The little finger was just a ragged stump, now once again bleeding freely. She pulled out her water flask and began to clean the wound.
Lief felt queasy, and turned away.
‘He is a strange-looking being. What is he?’ Jasmine asked in a low voice.
‘A Capricon,’ said Barda. ‘The first I have seen with my own eyes, though I have met travellers who told of sighting small groups of them in the mountains of the east.’
‘Are they wanderers, then?’ Jasmine asked.
Lief wondered if she was trying to keep her mind from her gruesome task with these questions.
Probably not. Jasmine was never squeamish. More likely she was trying not to think of the dragon still feasting on the next hill.
Determinedly, he turned back to face her. He, too, preferred not to think of the dragon.
‘The Capricons are wanderers now,’ Barda said. ‘Those that are left. But it is said that once they lived in a rose-pink city called Capra, the most beautiful city in the east. The people of Broome claim that their city is built on Capra’s ruins, but I do not know if that is true.’
‘I wonder why the Capricons left their home,’ Jasmine said, as she smeared ointment on the ghastly wound and quickly began to bandage it.
‘Perhaps they were driven out by servants of the Shadow Lord, as the people of the City of the Rats were,’ murmured Lief.
‘For what purpose?’ Jasmine tied the bandage firmly and sat back on her heels with a sigh.
‘Who knows?’ Lief said, his eyes on the dragon. ‘We might as well ask why the Shadow Lord wanted the City of the Rats to be abandoned. He could just as well have enslaved the people there as anywhere else.’
Barda shrugged. ‘In any case, it is ancient history. It is said that Capra was in ruins before Adin made the Belt of Deltora, and Capricons have always held themselves apart. Little is known of them.’
‘Dragons,’ mumbled the Capricon. ‘Dragons took Capra from us.’
His eyes fluttered open. They were a deep, violet blue, glazed with shock and confusion.
‘Once the Capricons were many,’ he said thickly. ‘Once we were a great people, with a great city. But the dragons envied us. They wanted Capra for their own, because it was rich and beautiful. So they attacked again and again, killing and destroying, till at last the Capricons were driven out, and Capra was in ruins …’
His voice trailed off. He lifted his bandaged hand and stared at it dazedly. ‘I … I am hurt,’ he stammered. ‘How have I …?’
Then his face changed as slowly memory returned. He began to tremble.
‘I came from the mountains of the east, to seek help from the king,’ he murmured. ‘Help for my people …’
Kree landed on Jasmine’s arm with a warning squawk. She looked up.
Lief glanced up too and his heart pounded as he saw that the dragon, its meal finished, had turned in their direction, and was spreading its wings.
‘Barda,’ he said urgently. ‘You and Jasmine move into the trees. Take our friend—’
‘I am Rolf,’ the Capricon broke in. ‘Rolf, eldest son of the clan Dowyn, heir to the lordship of Capra. I—’
Without ceremony, Barda hauled him up and began dragging him out of the clearing, his hoofs trailing in the dust.
Jasmine remained where she was, her eyes fixed to the sky. Filli, too was looking up, chattering fearfully. Jasmine murmured to him, and he crept beneath her collar. But Kree stayed on her arm, still as a statue.
‘Jasmine—’ Lief began.
She shook her head. ‘I am not leaving you, Lief,’ she said. ‘Do not waste energy arguing with me. Be ready!’
Lief looked up again, and for a wild moment could see nothing but empty sky.
Yet the dragon was coming. He knew it. He could hear the beating of its wings. He could see the treetops thrashing and the leaves flying, as if tossed by a gale.
The clearing darkened as something blocked the sun. Lief’s eyes strained as he searched for the shape he knew he must find.
Then, with a thrill of awe and terror, he saw it.
The golden dragon was hovering directly above the clearing, huge and menacing. Its whole underside was pale blue, blending perfectly with the afternoon sky, so that from below it was almost invisible.
As Lief watched, it began to sink lower, lower, its wings beating lazily, its terrible talons spread.
The Belt of Deltora seemed to throb in time to the wingbeats. Lief tore his eyes from the dragon and looked down. The topaz was gleaming like the sun.
His head was spinning. Dimly he realised that he had been holding his breath. He forced himself to breathe out, take in more air.
Dust was swirling about him. He felt Jasmine grip his arm, heard her shouting over the roaring of the wind, but he could not understand what she wanted of him.
There was a blur of black in front of him. It was Kree, screeching, wings beating on his face. And now Jasmine was in front of him too, pushing him, screaming at him. Confused, he stumbled back, back to the edge of the clearing.
And only when he found himself pressed against the tree to which the Capricon had been bound did he realise why Jasmine had wanted him to move. Only then did he raise his head, just in time to see the vast beast land, settling onto the dust, curling its tail around its huge body, completely filling the clearing with a blinding shimmer of gold.
The dragon turned its massive head and fixed him with a golden eye. Lief felt himself captured, held. He could not look away.
‘You wear the Belt of the ancients,’ the dragon said. ‘The great topaz shines for you. I feel its power flowing into me, like new blood in my veins. You are the king who was promised.’
The words vibrated in Lief’s ears, hollow and echoing as if rising from a deep well. He could see his own reflection in the dragon’s eye, drifting there like a small, lonely creature drowning in an ancient sea.
In his mind there was no thought. Everything he had planned to say had vanished from his mind.
The dragon blinked, and the spell was broken. Suddenly freed, Lief gasped and staggered.
‘I have slept long, and in my sleep I dreamed,’ the dragon said. ‘My dreams were good dreams of times as they once were, when the skies were free and the air of my domain was sweet. Now you have awoken me—to this!’
Its black, forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air. ‘The land is not well. I feel an evil presence, poison leaking into the earth from some dark centre. Who has done this, while I slept?’
‘The Enemy from the Shadowlands,’ Lief said huskily. ‘The Enemy whose creatures destroyed your race, long ago.’
The flat, golden eye regarded him coldly. ‘My race was not destroyed,’ the dragon said. ‘Am I not here? Do you think I am a dream?’
Lief stared, not knowing what to say.
Thoughtfully the dragon raised a claw and picked a small piece of bone from between its sharp, white teeth.
‘The topaz you wear has given me new life, but my long sleep has left my body weak,’ it said. ‘One Granous has done little to satisfy my hunger. But when I have fed well and gathered strength, I will search out this evil thing that lies in my land like a worm in a bud, and I will destroy it, if I can.’
Lief’s heart leaped.
‘There is more than one,’ he said eagerly. ‘There are four—called by the Enemy the Four Sisters. And we already know where one of them lies. It is on the east coast, in a place called Dragon’s Nest.’
The dragon’s eyes seemed to glaze. ‘The east coast is the territory of the ruby, and not my concern,’ it said.
The blood rushed to Lief’s face. ‘But surely the whole of Deltora is your concern!’ he exclaimed. ‘As it is mine!’
The dragon’s terrible jaws gaped wide. Jasmine cried out in warning and reached for her dagger. But then it became clear that the beast was only yawning.
‘The territory of the ruby is not my concern,’ it repeated at last. ‘Even if I wished to enter it, I could not do so without breaking the oath I swore before I slept. And I cannot break my oath, for I swore it by my blood, and by my teeth, and by my young as yet unborn, to the man called Dragonfriend.’
Hearing Lief’s cry of astonishment, it seemed to smile. ‘Do you know of Dragonfriend?’ it asked. ‘The one your people called the Dragonlover?’
‘Of—of course!’ Lief stammered. ‘But—’
‘Seven savage enemies prowled our skies in those days,’ the dragon said. ‘Together, they hunted us. They killed and killed again till at last it came to pass that I was the only one left of all my tribe. Dragonfriend came to me in my loneliness. He said that each of the other dragon tribes had suffered the same fate.’
‘You mean—only one dragon remained from each of the seven tribes?’ Lief burst out.
The dragon moved restlessly. ‘So Dragonfriend told me, and so I believed, for I had known him of old, and he had never lied to me.’
The golden eye flicked in Lief’s direction. Lief swallowed, and nodded.
‘Dragonfriend had made a plan to preserve our lives,’ the dragon went on. ‘He was wise in our ways. He knew that dragons can sleep for centuries, if they must. He said that I, and the other six, should hide ourselves from the Enemy and let sleep embrace us until it was safe to wake.’
‘But how—how would you know when it was safe?’ Jasmine asked. ‘What was to stop you sleeping forever?’
The dragon turned its cold gaze upon her. Lief saw the flat, golden eye dwelling with interest on her flowing hair, and wished she had not spoken.
‘Dragonfriend said that one day each of us would be called by the great gem of our own territory,’ the dragon said. ‘He said the call would only come when the heir of the ancient king Adin was near us, wearing the Belt of Power. For that would mean that the Shadow Lord had been defeated and his creatures banished from our skies.’
‘So the seven of you slept,’ Lief breathed. ‘And—you each swore not to take advantage of another’s sleep to invade its land.’
‘That is so,’ said the dragon. ‘And I will not break my oath. If you wish to seek the evil at Dragon’s Nest, you must rouse the dragon of the ruby to help you.’
‘But what if the ruby dragon cannot be found?’ Lief asked desperately. ‘What if it is unwilling? Or dead? Will you come to me then?’
The dragon closed its eyes. After a long moment it opened them again. ‘If it cannot be found, or if it is unwilling, the oath to Dragonfriend must stand. If it is dead … then we shall see.’