The morning before the group was planning to leave, Jenka walked out to his best friend's farm to tell him goodbye. Grondy’s hand was healing nicely, but his father needed him on the farm. They had go en a contract to grow hay and corn for some ranchers down in Three Forks.
Grondy’s des ny, it turned out, wasn’t with the King’s Rangers. It was behind an ox and a thresher in one of the foothill’s golden valleys. Jenka didn’t want to taunt his friend with what he would be missing, so he held back with his descrip on of the coming journey. Even so, Grondy confessed that he wanted to go more than anything. It was a sad par ng, and Jenka spent a few long moments a er he got down the lane from the growing farm studying the trees and wiping the dust from his eyes.
Later that a ernoon, a group of King’s Rangers came riding into Crag all bloody and raving about a kill. “We got that dragon!” they bragged.
“Felled him way back in Calf Horn Valley.”
They had come to fetch Master Kember and Lemmy, but when they stopped by Jenka’s hut to purchase some healing po ons from his mother, they drew Jenka into it too. He was lucky that Master Kember waved him over and handed him the reigns of the horse intended for Lemmy. Lemmy was nowhere to be seen, and Jenka was too worried that the rangers had just killed Jade to care about anything else. He mounted the offered animal and followed Master Kember and the rangers out of Crag and up into the hills. They rode un l dark, then the rangers lit torches for them to see by, and they rode some more. Jenka figured that they were already deeper into the foothills than he had ever been before.
The group came out from under the sparse trees and topped a ridge overlooking an open, starlit valley. Off to one side of the open space, along what appeared to be a washed-out stream bed, there was a cluster of so ly glowing yellow flowers. The petals were bigger than any Jenka had ever seen before, almost as big as bed sheets. It would have been quite beau ful had there not been the long, broken-winged body of a small dragon lying sprawled across the earth nearby.
Jenka’s heart was thudding in his chest and the lump in his throat was the size of a gourd melon. The dragon was the right size to be Jade, but Jenka wasn’t close enough yet to be able to tell for certain. As they drew nearer, the dragon's scales began to shimmer a deep, greenish color.
Jenka’s chest clenched with sadness, but then Captain Brody stepped up out of nowhere and quickly said, “Hurry! Close your eyes un l a er the flash.”
“Whimza a,” a faint girlish voice spoke with a tongue-tangling inflec on. Suddenly, a sphere of stark, white light the size of a man’s head was hovering in the air a dozen feet above the dragon’s twisted corpse. The
air became full of humming, popping sta c and took on the clean smell of the sky right a er a lightning storm. Several of the rangers shied away from the orb as if it were contagious. The dainty, hooded figure underneath the magical globe seemed to think that was funny.
This was the first me Jenka had ever seen anyone use High Magic, and it was a li le bit disconcer ng. He had never seen one of the secre ve druids that the rangers some mes spoke of either. The Order of Dou supposedly had a monastery or a temple somewhere deep in the mountains. Some folks said they were elvish, but Jenka wasn’t sure he believed that. Due to their common interest of the forest, the druids some mes helped the rangers, but they had no sworn allegiance to King Blanchard or the kingdom.
Jenka cringed when he saw a pale, ta oo-lined feminine face peering out from under the hood directly at him. The druida’s gaze cut right through him, and he felt his scalp ngling as if his hair were standing on end.
“Is that the one?” Master Kember asked. He put his hand on Jenka’s shoulder, breaking the spell he had fallen under. “It’s s ll got both of its eyes.”
Under the bright magical light, Jenka saw that the dead dragon’s scales were the color of a deep, blackish-blue bruise, not green. He knew instantly that it wasn’t Jade. He was surprised at how relieved he felt. He hadn’t expected to be so worried about a creature that he had only spoken to once. Sure they had saved each other’s lives, but the truth of it was they were supposed to be natural enemies. Nevertheless, he was glad that it wasn’t his friend lying dead in the glade.
“Maybe I missed?” he shrugged. “It’s almost black.”
The druida’s magical light suddenly disappeared. In the momentary blindness everyone experienced while their eyes adjusted to the darkness, she moved impossibly fast and slid up close to Jenka’s side.
“Liar,” she almost purred the word into his ear, causing his blood to ngle with both fear and arousal at the same me. Her breath smelled of cinnamon and ginger, and she radiated a so invi ng heat like a woodstove.
“Master Kember, I would like a word with our young troll-slayer if you please.” She gave a respec ul head bow to punctuate her request.
Master Kember’s expression showed the unease he felt at being this close to the eerie -- yet exo cally beau ful -- ta ooed girl. On the islands, and in Port and Mainsted, the prac ce of the arcane was more commonplace. There were witches and charm-makers on every corner, but out here in the fron er it was rare - and some mes shunned. Jenka’s mother used magic of a sort, and he saw how people were afraid of her for it, but it was nothing like the High Magic that this druida had just been using. Master Kember gave Jenka’s shoulder a compassionate squeeze and hurried away, leaving Jenka and the druida alone.
“It’s all right, Jenka De Swasso,” her voice was sweet and liquid, and it dripped into Jenka’s ears and flowed into him like honey. She looked surprisingly young; barely a woman. She had four thin, blue-green lines running diagonally across the bridge of her nose. There was an intricately-decorated circle on her right cheek, a similar square on her le , and on her forehead was a silvery triangle that pointed down at the p of her nose, giving her brow a permanently sinister look. A few tendrils of snow white
hair trailed out of her hood. Her eyes, though. Her eyes were pools of sparkling lavender that were so deep a person could drown in them.
“My name is Zahrellion, but you can call me Zah,” she said. “Why did you lie about the dragon?”
Jenka was answering before he could stop himself. “Because Jade saved me from a certain death at the hands of the trolls. I can never forget that.”
“Jade? You know its name? You spoke with this wyrm?”
“Yes I did, and I don’t care if you believe me or not. Just don’t tell … ”
She cut him off. “Oh, I believe you, Jenka.” Her eyes grew wide with a girlish excitement that she de ly quelled the second the emo on showed.
Looking around to make sure no one was listening in on their conversa on, she hooked her arm in Jenka’s and led him away from the dragon carcass.
“I’ve talked to a dragon too, way up in the icy peaks. They choose to aid people every now and then when things come to a head. A me like that is at hand. Crystal told me that something evil has awakened in the hills.
Most likely, you and Jade will meet again.” Her brows narrowed as the direc on of the conversa on took a sour turn. “We have a common enemy, dragons and men. The trolls don’t like the humans, and we are spreading and popula ng the fron er like field mice. King Blanchard won’t make the move, but he has planned it all out for his son. When Prince Richard takes the throne, the kingdom seat will shi to Mainsted, here on the mainland, and once that happens, there will be no hope for the trollkin.”
The word trollkin was a slang term that included the li le, gray-skinned goblins, the larger, black-skinned orc, and of course the trolls themselves. A er hearing Jade call the trolls trellkin, he decided that
maybe it wasn’t a slang term a er all. Ogres, Jenka had deduced, were another sort of creature altogether.
“They are star ng to figure this out,” Zahrellion con nued. “Already they’ve been forced into the higher reaches where the ogres and dragons reign. Soon there will be nowhere le for them to go. The dragons, on the other hand, can always nest out of man's reach. Only a very few of the most foolish wyrms get their selves killed, those are usually the mudged, like this one. There are hundreds of dragons in the deep of the mountains, Jenka. Some of the wyrm are older than you can imagine.”
Jenka stopped her and shook his head to clear it. He had lost her words in the feel of her dainty hand on his bicep, in the warmth of her smile, and in the convic on of her voice.
“I’m telling you that we have to find a way to make King Blanchard or Prince Richard understand.” Her voice showed that she was becoming agitated, if not a li le angry.
“Understand what?” Jenka asked stupidly.
She jerked her hand away, let out an exasperated girlish huff, and clenched her fists at her sides. “That the dragons want to help us when the trolls start their war! They’re in the hills gathering and planning as we speak.”
“War?” Jenka didn’t understand. “Is it the Dragons or the Trolls who are in the hills planning right now?” Jenka had no idea what she was talking about. He was entranced by her very existence though, and couldn’t get his mind to focus on anything other than her beauty.
She stared at him for a few long moments. “You’re da ,” she finally said. Her eyes were brimming over with tears of disappointment as she turned and stalked away.
Jenka stood there, slack-jawed, staring at the darkness un l Master Kember came over and started speaking to him. “Fargin women’ll twist your thinker ll it pops.”
“What?” Jenka asked.
