Free Dragon Forge: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Two by James Wyatt Page A

But the sunken ship they’d passed in the channel suggested otherwise. Gaven growled in frustration, and thunder rumbled in the clouds overhead. The winds grew stronger, and the clouds roiled in a great maelstrom.
    They were close enough to identify now. One was the same dragon that he’d seen before, at the sentinel pillars. Its wings didn’t so much flap as undulate along the length of its serpentine body, and it managed to ride the wind better than the other. Sunlight shone gold on its scales. The new dragon was a bit smaller, but its white body was thicker. It flapped its wings furiously in the wind.
    They weren’t too large, by dragon standards—both were smaller than Vaskar had been, but Gaven would barely reach the shoulder of either one. The gold dragon had two sharp hornssweeping back from its brow, and a number of small tendrils extending like a beard from its cheeks and chin. A thin crest started just behind its horns and ran the length of its neck, matching the twin membranes of its fanlike wings. Where the gold gave an air of wisdom and subtlety, the white dragon was all predatory hunger. A short, thick crest topped its wolflike head, and thick plating started at its neck and its heavy tail.
    The gold circled above the ship, and a moment later the white landed heavily on the deck, right in front of Gaven. The deck creaked as the galleon keeled forward, and Gaven stumbled backward to avoid sliding right into the dragon’s claws. The dragon growled deep in its throat, and it took a moment for Gaven to realize that it was forming words in Draconic.
    “You should not be here, meat,” the dragon said, prowling a few steps closer to Gaven. It ran a blue-white tongue over the teeth on one side of its mouth.
    Meat
—dragons sometimes used the same word for humanoids as they did for food. A vivid memory sprang to Gaven’s mind: Vaskar’s bronze-scaled mouth closing around the neck of a wyvern. He shook the memory from his head. He would not be meat, and neither would any other person on the
Sea Tiger
.
    “I’ve come to learn the wisdom of the dragons,” Gaven said in Draconic.
    The dragon pulled its head back, evidently surprised to be answered in its own language. Then it snarled and snaked forward again. “Then you’ve made a fatal mistake, meat.” It bared its daggerlike teeth and started padding toward Gaven.
    “You’re the one who has erred,” Gaven said.
    Thunder rumbled overhead as if to underscore his words, and Gaven thrust his arms forward. A ball of lightning formed around him then hurtled at the dragon as a mighty bolt and a resounding clap of thunder. The force of it knocked the dragon back and over the bulwark. It thrashed about for a moment before catching air under its wings again.
    Gaven watched as the dragon flapped up and away from the ship, clearly both hurt and daunted by the blast of thunder and lightning.
    “Gaven!” Rienne’s voice behind him jolted him around just as a great gout of flame washed over the deck.
    The gold dragon flew above the highest mast, blowing a stream of fire from its mouth to cover the whole deck with a blanket of fire. To his surprise, Gaven didn’t see any of the crew—just Rienne, standing near the main hatch, surrounded by leaping flames. She cried out.
    Drawing a quick, deep breath of the searing hot air, Gaven thrust his arms out to the front and back, and a great blast of wind swept the fire from the deck. Rienne fell to her knees.
    Gaven cursed, and lightning flared in the clouds. A flashing bolt speared through the gold dragon, knocking it into the water with a great splash. He ran to Rienne and bent to help her stand.
    “Never mind me,” she gasped. She pointed weakly behind him.
    Gaven spun around just in time to catch the full brunt of a blast of frozen air streaming from the white dragon’s mouth. Frost crusted on his eyes and mouth, ice formed in his hair, and a layer of rime coated the deck. He staggered backward a few steps and