Free Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley Page A

curlicue mazes where you could get lost and never come out and not mind. And it’s hot . I was sweating. Maybe with fear (and with being sick), but with the heat of her staring too.
    So there I was, finally seeing a dragon up close—really really up close—the thing I would have said that I wanted above every other thing in the world or even out of the world that I could even imagine wanting. And it was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You’re saying, wait a minute, you dummy, it’s not worse than your mom dying. Or even your dog. It kind of was though, because it was somehow all three of them, all together, all at once.
    I stared back. What else could I do—for her? I held her gaze. I took a few steps into that labyrinth in her eye. It was sort of reddish and smoky and shadowy and twinkling. And it was like I really was standing there, with Smokehill behind me, not Smokehill all around us both as I stood and stared (and shuddered). The heat seemed to sort of all pull together into the center of my skull, and it hung there and throbbed. Now I was sweating from having a headache that felt like it would split my head open. So that’s my excuse for my next stupid idea: that I saw what she was thinking. Like I can read a dragon’s expression when I mostly can’t tell what Dad or Billy is thinking. Well, it felt like I could read her huge dying eye, although maybe that was just the headache, and what I saw was anger—rage—despair. Easy enough to guess, you say, that she’d be feeling rage and despair, and it didn’t take any creepy mind-reading. But I also saw…hope.
    Hope?
    Looking at me, as she was looking at me ( bang bang bang went my skull), a little hope had crept into the despair. I saw this happen. Looking at me, the same sort of critter, it should have seemed to her, as had killed her.
    And then she died.
    And I was back in Smokehill again, standing next to a dead dragon, and the beautiful, dangerous light in her eye was gone.
    And then I did touch her. I forgot about the dead-dragon fire-reflex, and I crouched down on the stinking, bloody ground, and rested my forehead against a tiny little sticky-out knob of her poor ruined head, and cried like a baby. Cried more than I ever had for Mom—because, you know, we’d waited so long, and expected—but not really expected—the worst for so long, that when the worst finally arrived we couldn’t react at all.
    Twenty rough miles in a day and crying my head off—when I staggered to my feet again, feeling like a fool, I was so exhausted I barely could stand. And while none of this had taken a lot of time, still, it was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking, and I needed to get back to Pine Tor tonight if at all possible. I began drearily to drag myself back the way I had come. I had to walk past all the little dead dragonlets again. I looked at them not because I wanted to but to stop myself from looking at the poacher’s body. Which is how I noticed that one of them was still breathing.
    A just-born dragon is ridiculously small, not much bigger than the palm of your hand. Old Pete had guessed they were little, but even he didn’t guess how little. I’m not even sure why I recognized them, except that I was already half nuts and they seemed to be kind of smoky and shadowy and twinkling. The color Mom goes to have them and get their tummies lit up lasts a few hours or as much as half a day, but no one—not even Old Pete—had ever seen the babies or the fire-lighting actually happening and maybe that’s not really when they’re born or lit at all, and it’s just Mom’s color that makes humans think “fire.”
    But I did recognize them. And I could see that the smokiest, twinklingest of the five of them was breathing: that its tiny sides were moving in and out. And because no one knows enough about dragons one of the things I’d read a