Voices of Dragons

She checked the coordinates on the map in her atlas, tracing latitude and longitude to a place near the northern edge of Greenland. But that couldn’t have been right, because there was nothing there, just the Arctic Ocean and a bunch of ice. She drew a circle around the general area and put an X roughly at the intersection of the coordinates. Not exactly a point on the map to chase down, but she was still curious. She’d ask Artegal about it.

Kay took a spiral notebook from her pile of schoolwork and turned to a blank page. Back at the begi

When she finished, she carefully wrapped the book in a clean towel and hid it in a drawer.

Looking at local topographical maps, she found a valley—barely a valley, more like a forgotten space between a set of hills close to the dragon side of the border. It was too close to the border to be frequented by dragons, but hidden from surveillance on the human side. It may give them enough space to experiment.

She told Artegal about the place, describing it in terms of compass readings based on the map, so many degrees from north. He better understood when she marked it in relation to the setting sun.

“I know this place,” he said. “It is good.”

“I found something else in the book,” she said, after they’d agreed on their plan. “It’s newer, I think. Someone wrote down coordinates on a piece of paper and slipped it between the pages. It’s for a place way north and east—near Greenland, do you know where that is?”

“The Arctic islands?” he questioned.

“I think so.”

He purred thoughtfully. “East, where my mentor vanished.”

Someone had copied down latitude and longitude, believed they were important enough to write down. But they didn’t label the coordinates—to keep them secret? “You think he went there?” Kay said. “Who wrote the note?”

“I do not know,” Artegal said.

A week later, they met somewhere other than their secret glade by the creek. Knowing her parents, knowing the patrol schedules and where she could go and have it be unlikely she’d be found helped her hide. It also helped that she’d grown up in these woods and knew the landmarks. She could leave the trails and not get lost.

She parked her Jeep at a trailhead where it wouldn’t be out of place. This required a couple of extra miles of hiking to reach their meeting spot, which meant starting out stupidly early. She brought along with her yards of rope and her rock-climbing harness. She kept thinking, This is crazy. Completely insane.

“You’ve been doing a lot of hiking. Especially for this time of year,” her mother had observed when Kay left the house.

“It’s been helping with all the stress at school,” Kay had explained. Her mother seemed pleased with the explanation, as if proud that Kay was handling the stress on her own.

She wore her warmest layers of clothing and brought along chemical warmers for her boots and gloves. She didn’t need them at first, hiking hard with her climbing gear in a backpack. She was sweating.

Artegal had already arrived and was waiting. He tilted his head to study the equipment slung over her shoulders. “Make harness. With this?”

“I’m not sure it’ll even work. It may not work.” She kept saying that, and yet she wanted to try it. How different could it be? You secured your line. You clipped in. You didn’t fall. End of story.

“We’ll try,” he said, and that was that.

First, she arranged the line on the ground in front of Artegal, eyeing the dragon and trying to estimate how much it would take to circle that giant frame. A figure eight would work best, she decided, looped over his chest in front of and behind his wings and meeting in the back. “Will this hurt you if it goes over your wings?”

He snorted a puff of steam out his nose. “As you say, I’m not sure.”

Leaning forward, he lowered himself to the ground, on top of where Kay had spread the lines out. Taking one end of the line, she touched Artegal’s shoulder. The scales were smooth, cool. She imagined that if she knocked her knuckles on them, they’d ring out. She lay her hand flat. A jump and a couple of steps would carry her up to his back. They’d been meeting each other for weeks, but they’d only talked. This was the first time she’d touched him since the day he fished her out of the river. It seemed awkward.

Artegal, his head turned to watch her, nodded once.

Pulling with her hands, pushing with her feet, she scrambled up the slope of his shoulder and found herself kneeling on his back. She had to think to keep her balance. She could feel his body shift as he breathed, the rhythmic movement of lungs, in and out.

He seemed huge from this angle. She could stand on his back, and it would be like standing on a smooth, flat floor.

She did this three more times, to bring the other ends of the rope up. She looped them together and knotted them securely as if she were tying a rope to someone else’s harness. She left herself a loop and a carabiner—a steel oval with a hinged closure—to secure her harness to.

He didn’t seem to mind her clambering all over him. She thought she would have felt it if he flinched or winced. Leaning on his back, she called to him, “Tell me if I’m hurting you.”

His lip curled. “Would take much more to hurt me.”

She checked every line, knot, and carabiner three times. Finally, she put on her climbing harness, secured around her waist and legs. She’d left her helmet at home—if she fell from the air, a helmet wouldn’t do much good. She thought she was ready. Standing on the ground by his shoulder, she looked at Artegal, into his shining eye.

“Are we sure about this?” she said.

“We can prove the book is not false,” he said. “And—is exciting. An adventure.”

That, she understood. “It sure is.”

“If something goes wrong, call to me,” he said.

Once again she climbed up his shoulder, to the middle of his back, between his forelimbs. She snapped the carabiner on her harness onto the loop on Artegal’s harness. She stretched out, lying facedown, bracing with her legs.

“Ready?” he said. Even with his head turned, she could just see the corner of his eye at the end of his long stretch of silvery neck.

Not really. But she never would be until she did it. She held onto the ropes as tightly as she could. “Yeah.”

He walked, carrying her on foot for a quarter of a mile, to the line of forest that marked the valley. The motion felt lurching, shoulders bunching and lifting as he moved his arms and wings, his hind legs causing his whole body to roll like a boat as he pushed himself forward. If she were prone to motion sickness, she would be sick from this. But she crouched, sitting up slightly on her hands and knees, letting her body shift and rock with the motion. She could even start to look around her and marvel at the world from fifteen feet off the ground. High branches passed by at eye level; birds flew below her.

The path he took crested, then started downhill. He didn’t warn her when he launched straight up, fast as a rocket.

She fell and slammed against his scaly back, grunting as the harness took all of her weight. The breath was knocked out of her. Dangling, she rolled over until she was looking up at bright blue sky. She grabbed the rope and pulled herself back to stability, digging her toes in, bracing. Artegal flinched a little—no more than the shiver of muscle she’d have when shrugging off a fly. If he was going to do things like that without telling her, then he’d just have to put up with her scrambling on his back.