Free Dragonfriend by Marc Secchia Page A

to extended her daily total to three hundred. Ten for Shyana, ten for Chalcion, ten for Elki …
    Peer at the cave entrance. Flicker might as well have been eaten by a windroc.
    Like it or not, Lia worried about Flicker. She pressed her fingers to her temples, failing to fathom the feelings churning so fiercely inside of her breast. As ever, Lia felt as though she strived for the unattainable, that if she could only wish strongly enough, a locked and barred door within her soul would burst open and all would be … glorious. Light. Touched by the insignia of fire. She would not feel chained in spirit, trapped within her own skin, but rather, there would be an indefinable sense of freedom, a knowledge akin to wind rustling unseen through trees. Often, this yearning emerged in her dance. Step faster. Soar higher. Grace drawn from the spirit of flame, juxtaposed with the limitations of ordinary flesh. Always, she wept for what she could not touch.
    Stopping to pant, to strike the wetness off her cheeks. Weak! How could she hope to stand against the Roc when mere dance reduced her to stupid, girlish tears?
    Soaring again, pirouetting and flaring the left leg, now a spin, ignoring the tugging sensation across her scarred back, springing into a looping somersault, legs elegantly extended and toes pointed in imitation of a Dragon’s wings … if only the air would not refuse her entreaties and choose, just this once, to bear her aloft! What more did she desire?
    Flicker. All was not well. Lia stepped into the golden rays of a fragrant Fra’aniorian afternoon, the scents so thick and redolent on the breeze, she imagined she could stretch out her arms and scoop up great handfuls, stuffing them greedily into her mouth. Unbidden, her head turned to the north. She drew a breath through her pathetic, inadequate nostrils, right into the roots of her lungs.
    Flicker, my darling. Where are you?
    If she could have cut out her heart and sent it winging away to him, she would have. He needed her. She knew it as deeply as her bones knew their need for marrow.
    Pensively, Hualiama’s footsteps turned to the cave. If she could do nothing else, she would explore deeper beneath the Island. Perhaps she would discover something useful.
    * * * *
    Flicker waited in his cell.
    There was no door to the small underground chamber, located off a quiet corridor of the warren, nor was there need of one. Tradition and expectation bound a dragonet more surely than any Human chains or locks. The communal hive-mind saw to that. It saw all, pervaded all, and judged all, just as he was surely being judged by Mother Lyrica and her Twelve and being found guilty of behaviour unbecoming of his kind. He threatened the harmony. He brought the imbalance of original thought and unsettling perspectives to the gentle, never-changing thrum of the warren, as though his music conveyed a different pulse, being strident or discordant in ways he did not entirely understand.
    No behaviour of an individual dragonet should ever threaten the sanctity and security of the warren. He could only hope that respect for the Ancient One would temper their judgement.
    Was it so evil of him to have plucked an injured Human girl from the air? Perhaps not, but what had followed would terrify them–just as he, when he looked to his Dragon fires, felt at once alarmed and exhilarated. Dragonets should not keep Humans for pets. Dragonets should not treat a Human’s wounds, nor teach them civilised speech. Roost with a Human? That lay beyond the Isle of sanity.
    A scratching of claws heralded Shimyal’s arrival.
    He read accusation in her gaze and hurt in the tilt of her wings. Flicker, she said. What of us?
    What indeed? Once, a promise made by their egg-mothers. A lifelong friendship, yet the seven ascending degrees of fire-promises had always remained unspoken between them–never needing to be spoken, he had assumed. That was a mistake. Flicker’s hearts burbled in his chest and throat as he