Draca woke with their smells in her nose. The invaders were quiet, they were sneaky. They came creeping in the night's deep darkness with no torches to give them away. They padded their feet with cloths to muffle their steps.

But they couldn't stop her from smelling them. Metal and oil – warriors in armor, carrying swords and shields. And beneath that, the man-stink of sweat and dirt and bad breath. They'd eaten sausages and onions.

She raised her head from her crossed forepaws. Tasted the air with a flick of her tongue.

Man-stink. Five or six of them. The smell of bravery was in their sweat, but so was the smell of fear.

They had good reason to be afraid.

So did Draca. As big as she was, as powerful as she was, she knew that if there were enough of them, they could hurt her.

These men were strong. They came in a pack, like wolves.

What did they want? Was it just her treasure? Just the heaps of gold and silver and jewels she'd collected over the years? If they found it, would they take what they could carry, and go? Or did they want something more?

A nice head to mount on their castle wall, perhaps.

Draca bared her teeth. She did not want to become a stuffed head on anyone's castle wall. But even her life wouldn't be the worst thing she could lose.

She bent her long neck, lifted her left wing, and looked down.

The same bright moonlight that let the men find their way also shined down through cracks in the cave ceiling. It sparkled on the coins and gems that covered the rocky floor.

It gleamed pearly-white on the curved shell of the egg.

Losing her treasure would be bad. Losing her head would be worse.

Losing her egg, her only precious egg, that would be worst of all.

If it had been only one man, or two, she would have charged out of the cave already. Wings spread, jaws gaping, ready to burn them to ashes with a blast of her fire-breath. Six of them, though … it was too many. While she was burning some, the others might get past her, and into the lair. They might smash her lovely egg.

Her nose twitched. She smelled something new. Something she didn't like at all. It made her eyes sting and start to water.

Dragonbane. The hated magical plant, all bristly and spiny, that made all dragons itch and sneeze just to be near it. The awful magical plant that, when squeezed, gave a sticky juice that could be put on sword blades, or arrowheads.

That's what they were doing. Right now. One of them had dragonbane, which had been closed up in a jar so she couldn't smell it until the jar was opened. They were out there dipping their arrows in it now, and rubbing it on their swords.

Those dragonbane-treated weapons would cut right through her thick scales as if she was made of paper. The plant's poison would eat into her, freezing like ice and burning like fire.

She had to get out of here.

But the egg!

The egg was too big and smooth to carry. If she tried to fly with it held in her forepaws, she'd be sure to drop it. She couldn't get her jaws around it, either.

Draca looked around her lair. The pouch of loose skin under her chin puffed in and out. Her fire-pouch, sucking in air, getting ready to blow fire.

The piles of treasure glittered in the moonlight. Gold and silver, diamonds and rubies, cups and platters and crowns. If she buried the egg in it, hid it …

No. Men were greedy. They wouldn't just fill their pockets and then go. They'd come back with huge sacks and carts, until every last bit of her hoard was theirs. They'd find the egg and take it away.

She only had one choice.

Moonfire.

She'd have to trust her egg to Moonfire.

Rearing up on her hind legs, she picked up the egg in her forepaws and held it cradled to her chest. It was so warm, so heavy, so close to hatching. She walked, lurching unsteadily with her tail dragging a path in the heaps of coins, to the side of the cave.

A smaller opening here led out to a ledge. No knights ever came this way, because under the ledge was a sheer cliff-drop, hundreds of feet to the treetops of the forest below. The ledge was bare stone, the passageway so narrow that Draca couldn't get her whole body through. She folded her wings tight against her back and leaned her neck and front half out into the night air.

Once, years and years ago, great-eagles had built a nest in a sheltered nook on the ledge. The eagles were gone, having decided that they didn't like sharing the sky and the hunting with a dragon. But the nest was still there. It was old and dusty, and the dragon egg was almost too big to fit.

Draca set the egg in the nest, in a pool of moonlight. She stroked the shell with her cheek. Something stirred inside. The shell rocked.

Moonfire will take care of you, my little one, Draca thought. Moonfire will watch over you.

She still a little time left. She used it to scoop up treasure in her mouth and spit it down a crevice in the stone. Coins clinked and jingled as they spilled into the crack. She used her tail to sweep another pile into a crack in the floor. Emeralds and silver rings and gold bracelets made a sort of music as they vanished down the crack.

The men outside must have heard her dumping her hoard. They rushed in, shields held high, swords waving.

Draca whirled to face them. The dragonbane burned her eyes, made her sneeze a puff of smoke.

Moonfire! She thought desperately as the warriors closed in. Moonfire, please, protect my egg!

The dragon rose from its cave in a coil of smoky-blue, the scales along its sinuous neck rippling like fog on the water. Its hungry golden eyes swept the deep forest before settling on the bold challenger standing before it.

Sir Lora the Fearless adjusted her silvery helm, raised her shield to protect her face from the dragon's fiery breath, and brandished her magic sword. At her side, her fierce but loyal wolf-companion bared his teeth at the monstrous wyrm.

"Knightsbane!" Sir Lora cried. "Behold your doom! I am come to slay you!"

Steam chuffed from its nostrils as the dragon chuckled. It swayed like a snake, trying to hypnotize her into immobility.

"No more shall you feed on the people of this kingdom and steal their treasures! I will chop you into dragon-burgers!"

She lunged and slashed with her sword, striking a blow against the dragon's treetrunk of a foreleg. The impact jarred the weapon from her hand.

Before she could pick it up, the wolf snatched it up in his jaws and bounded in a gleeful tail-wagging circle.

"Drop it!" Sir Lora commanded.

The wolf hunkered low to the ground, forepaws extended and haunches waggling. His ears canted forward. He grinned.

"I said drop it." She grabbed at the sword, but the wolf scampered out of her way just enough to taunt her.

"Ruff, darn it!" Lora yanked off her helmet, freeing her long dark hair. "How can we kill the great dragon if you won't let me have my sword? The whole kingdom is depending on us, you know. Now, give it. Give it here."

The dog let the stick fall from his mouth, but by then the fantasy was broken. Gone was brave Sir Lora, champion of the land, in her shining armor. Instead, she was regular old Lora Blake again. Only nine, not champion of anything except for the fourth-grade spelling bee.

"You're six years old," Lora said. "That's forty-two in dog years. So why do you have to act like such a little kid?"

Ruff barked, picked up the stick again, and dropped it closer to her feet. He hopped side to side and hunkered down again, eyes never leaving her.

Lora sighed. "Okay, okay." She hurled the stick across the clearing that used to be the barren rocky plain descending from the dragon's cave but was now just a bare patch in the woods.

With a yip of joy, Ruff was off. Lora shook her head and unhooked her plastic armor. Underneath, she wore jeans and a bright red sweatshirt over a tee shirt, but the warmth of the day encouraged her to take the sweatshirt off and tie the sleeves around her neck so that it hung like a cape.

Ruff came back, cavorting, teasing, trying to make her chase him. With Sir Lora's heroic quest shot, she gave in.

They played with the stick until even Ruff was exhausted and the stick itself was seriously gnawed, slobbery, and bedraggled.

"Yuck," Lora said, scrubbing her hands on her jeans. "Dog spit, Ruff, gross."

He lolled his tongue at her, trailing runners of saliva, apparently not sharing her opinion.

"Come on, let's go exploring."

She found a new branch. It was too big for Ruff to steal and get up to dickens. Using it as a walking stick, she turned away from the clearing and the big gnarled tree that a little imagination could turn into a dragon looming from a cave formed by two boulders tilted together.

In her mind, she became Frodo Baggins, except as a girl.

"You can be my faithful friend Samwise," she said to Ruff. "And we're going to Mordor, so look out for Ringwraiths."

They moved into the cool green shadows, rich with the scent of redwood and sea spray. Here and there, a few trees and flowering bushes were starting to show their spring colors amid the backdrop of evergreen. The sky was puffed with white clouds like lambs roaming a sapphire meadow.

It was the sort of rare spring day, her stepdad joked, that made the county tourism board and the college rush out and shoot photos for postcards, to prove to people that it didn't rain all the time in this part of the state.

The rain would be back, Lora knew. It was only April. They could count on a few more weeks of wet-and-grey before Trinity Bay's short-lived summer season began in earnest.

Rain or no, Lora loved it here. The Arizona desert where she used to live had been beautiful in its own stark way, but most of the time everybody stayed out of the sun, going from one air-conditioned place to another in equally air-conditioned cars.

Whenever she thought about her old home, a knot tightened in her stomach. She was glad to be here, glad to be with her mother again ... she loved Grandpa and her stepdad and her new baby brothers ... but it was horrible that her real father had died that way.

Trying to put those sad, scary thoughts out of her mind, she concentrated on her progress through the forest. Frodo and Sam, setting out on the loneliest leg of their journey.

To further the illusion, she took the birthstone ring off her pinkie finger and strung it on a piece of cord. She slipped the loop over her head so that the ring dangled against her chest.

"One Ring to rule them all," she said to Ruff. "Are you still looking out for Nazgul?"

He was, but so far there were only birds and chipmunks.

"When the twins get bigger, they can play with us. They can be Merry and Pippin, maybe."

The prospect cheered her, until she realized that by the time the twins were old enough to be interesting, she would have advanced well toward being a boring grown-up. Jenny Forrester, her nearest neighbor, was only twelve and already cared more about music and clothes than about having fun.

"I wish they'd made Seacliff a place for regular kids," she said, looking in the direction of the mansion that had recently reopened as some sort of hospital or institution.

Lora silently repeated the words to herself -- autistic, catatonic, brain-damaged. Her mom had explained them to her last year, when the sale had been finalized.

Autistic, catatonic, brain-damaged. They all meant pretty much the same thing, at least in her mind. If the Seacliff kids couldn't talk, go to school, or play, it didn't much matter what fancy names the doctors used.

The redwood trunks soared to towering heights around her. The ground was springy with untold ages of needles compressed into an earthen bed. The foliage overhead was so densely interlocked that it prevented any other plants from surviving at ground level and only allowed a little sunlight to pierce the gloom.

Kind of spooky ...

A furtive little chill crept up and down the back of Lora's neck, the kind of chill she got when reading a ghost story. Like Mom's new book. While Lora hadn't read it – Mom said she was too young – Lora knew it was about a girl who'd been killed and then come back as a ghost.

It was nothing like Mom's other books, which were kind of embarrassing, really. When Lora had been a little kid, she'd thought that it was neat to have a series of storybooks named after herself and her dog. Mom sometimes got shocked letters now from people – ladies, mostly – who had read the Lora and Ruff books to their kids and then thought that Mourning Glory would be okay for them, too.

Lora wished that she was old enough to read the new one. She didn't see why she shouldn't be allowed to. Didn't she read all of The Lord of the Rings? All of the Harry Potter books?

She could take it. She wasn't a baby.

And she liked being scared. Sort of.

She turned in a slow circle to look around. She wouldn't have been surprised to see a pallid form float out from between the trees, arms outstretched, fingers curled and beckoning ...

Ruff barked.

Lora, carried away by her fantasy, uttered a surprised little squeal and whirled, sure that she was going to see a ghost. Goosebumps ran up her arms all the way to the sleeves of her white Pokemon tee shirt.

But there was nothing but Ruff, standing with his ears perked forward.

"What's the matter, Ruff?"

He barked again, then began prancing and bobbing his head like he was begging for playful attention.

"Go away, dog!" a boy's voice shouted. It came from within a deep split in the base of a dead tree.

Ruff, not normally cowed by yelling, turned tail and bolted to Lora's side. There, he crouched, trembling and whining, all of his playfulness gone.

"Hey!" Lora said, stalking forward. "You didn't have to be mean to him, whoever you are!"

"Leave me alone!"

A strong and sudden wave of resentment went through her. She almost told the kid fine, if he wanted to be like that, she'd go. The urge was overpowering. She turned to leave.

But, as she looked back, her gaze found that opening in the redwood again. The lumpy sides of it widened in an inverted V, and she thought again of the whimsy that had been leading her through the forest in the first place.

Instead of stomping away, she giggled. The urge to leave dissipated with the sound of her merriment.

"Oops, Ruff ... this isn't Mordor, this is near Tom Bombadil's house. And that's Old Man Willow! So one of our hobbit friends must be trapped inside."

A head poked out of the tree. It belonged to a boy with tangled light brown hair, suspicious hazel eyes, and a scratched, smudged, dirty face.

"What are you talking about?" he asked.

"The Lord of the Rings."

"What's that?"

"What's that? Only the best books and movies ever! I've seen the movies ten times each, and read the books three times. What are you doing in there?"

"What does it look like?"

"It looks like you're hiding."

"Well, duh."

"You don't need to be so mean," she said. "We didn't do anything to you."

"You sicced your dog on me."

"I did not. He just wanted to play. His name's Ruff."

"So?"

"So ... mine's Lora. What's yours?"

He studied her for almost a whole minute, his face a sullen scowl. "Chris," he finally said.

"Why don't you come out of there?" Lora asked.

Chris emerged from the tree. He was twig-thin and bony, a little taller than Lora. His tee shirt had a fierce dinosaur on the front. His jeans and shoes were scuffed and muddy. She saw a white plastic band on his wrist that looked like a cheap watch.

"Do you go to my school? I haven't ever seen you before. Are you new?"

"Quit staring at me," Chris snapped.

Lora turned away so fast her head felt dizzy. "Sor-ry!"

"Are you gonna tattle on me? If you tell anyone I was out here, I'll get in trouble."

"I won't tell."

"Swear?"

"Sure."

"Then do it. Say it."

"I swear I won't tell!" She risked an impatient glance at him even though she didn't really want to. "Okay?"

"Okay," he said.

Lora smiled. "Wanna play?"

"Play what?" Chris regarded her with one raised, skeptical eyebrow.

Before she could choose one of her many, many suggestions, Ruff uttered a low warning growl. His fur bristling, he took a few stalking, stiff-legged steps away from them.

"Ruff?"

"Shh!" Chris warned, a strange, desperate look in his eyes.

Critch-crump -- heavy footsteps on pine needles.

Crack! -- a breaking branch.

Low voices, muttering ... drawing closer.

"I got to get out of here!" With a horrible hunted expression, Chris started running.

Lora gaped after him.

"Over there!" a woman called. "I see him through the trees. There he goes!"

The critch-crumping sped up, veered in the direction that Chris was fleeing.

Lora sensed that Ruff was about to bark again an instant before he did it, and jerked on his collar. All that came out was a muffled 'wrf.' He gave her a stinging look of reproach.

"Hush!" she hissed.

The pursuers flashed past a gap between tree trunks. Lora caught a glimpse of a tall man in brown pants and a plaid hunters' shirt, and a blonde woman in dark grey pants and a black jacket. They were so intent on Chris that they never glanced her way, though she stood right in the open with her sweatshirt hanging down her back red as a bullfighter's cape.

As soon as they were out of sight, Lora succumbed to the fear she'd caught from Chris. Ruff, too, seemed to understand that this was no time for games, and fell in beside her as she hurried away from the spot.

She went as fast as she could while trying not to make much noise, somehow sure that if those grown-ups found out she'd seen them, she'd be in big trouble.

"Leave me alone!" Chris' voice floated through the woods. He sounded like he'd gotten pretty far, but not far enough.

Lora shivered at his anguished tone. She berated herself for cowardice -- bold Sir Lora would have dashed to the rescue! -- but only quickened her pace.

Ruff whimpered and surged ahead. She stumbled at the sudden tug, fell to her knees, and skinned them both on an exposed root. She lost her grip on Ruff's collar.

"Ruff, stay!" she whispered urgently.

But with her grasp on his collar gone, Ruff didn't even pretend to obey. He streaked ahead into the shadows.

She could hear the grown-ups again, doubling back, getting closer.

They'd heard her, she just knew it. They'd heard her and they'd find her and who knew what would happen to her?

Lora scrambled back to her feet. Her jeans were torn, both knees skinned and sizzling with pain. She hobbled after Ruff and came to a place where one of the old redwood giants had fallen.

The massive trunk was almost as high as she was tall, its spongy surface riddled with insect-tunnels and sprouting with a layer of new growth. Lora ran to the larger end and found that the tree hadn't broken off but uprooted. The exposed roots, clotted with earth and stringy weeds, looked like clutching fingers at the end of a skeletal arm.

The space they enclosed made a shallow cave. She crouched there despite the fact that she shared the space with beetles, spiders, and other crawly things that would normally have sent her scurrying.

As the grown-ups came even closer, Lora's heart sank in dismay. They were bound to find her, and then what? Then what?

"-- sloppy," the woman said.

"But we have him now. No harm done."

"This time."

She could see them now, quite clearly through the screen of roots. The woman, tall and strong-looking, had blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a headband of dull metal that gleamed in a semicircle across her forehead from temple to temple. The man was old, not Grandpa-Travis old but with more grey than brown in his hair. His face was tanned, weathered, and lined. He had a big pale scar, and his eyes were like chips of stone poking out of the earth, jagged and sharp. Like the woman, he wore a metal headband.

He was carrying Chris ... and Chris was either sleeping, knocked out, or ...

Lora's mind quailed away from that last or.

They passed by only a few feet from her hiding place and kept going.

When she could neither see nor hear them anymore, Lora slowly blew out the breath she'd been holding.

She slid down until she was sitting on the soft soil with her back against one of the larger roots, and only then noticed that her face was wet from tears.

***

I'd like to make a comment about this article.

This page has been visited Hit Counter times.