SpringFire Read Free

babies!” Xyla’s vocal cries deafened my ears and her mental cries froze my mind.
    We streaked through the air back to the cave-pocked mountainside where the mages were hidden. But before we got there, red and green lightning shot up from the ground and across the sky.
    “No, Xyla!” I couldn’t tell if I shouted the words aloud or only in my mind. “We can’t go there! It’s the dragonmasters!”
    But she didn’t listen. Or couldn’t hear. We plummeted toward the earth. Then the lightning was all around us. It would strike any moment and kill us all.
    With a sudden sheer almost straight up, Xyla screamed again. I was sure she’d been hit. A flash in front of us blinded me. A sizzle shot past my head, and the energy of it seized my thoughts. A last jerk, and then we were falling. My heart squeezed in my chest, and I knew no more.

    The reflection of the world sparkles in the window of time.
    Gazing upon one another, smiling or storming or dancing or raging as the mood take them, the parallel worlds float upon the ether.
    A life passes between them on a thread, rainbow stars billowing out behind in its wake. And on the return journey, it skews in on itself to end where it began.
    Look upon the worlds. See how they glitter with life and blush golden with love.
    Let all who understand grow in wisdom.
    ~from The Esoterica of Mysteries

When I awoke, the earth spun beneath me. I lay curled up in a ball and shivering a little in the cool air. After a moment, the memory of everything that had happened came flooding back. The Royal Guard. And dragonmasters! They must have captured us, and I must be in a cell somewhere. And that meant that they had Xyla, too. Again. They’d captured her once before to force her to fight in the king’s pits. Futility overwhelmed me.
    And they’d have all the babies, too!
    With a groan of despair, I sat up to find that I was back in the clearing in front of the cave. Traz and Grey both lay nearby, still asleep or unconscious, I wasn’t sure which, and Xyla, too, sprawled on the ground. More like a dead thing.
    Stiff as I was, I got to my feet and tottered over to her. She was breathing, but shallowly, as if it were hard to draw breath. Her legs twitched a bit, and her color was off. She was usually a rich, bright red, but now she looked coppery, as if someone had rubbed her with a yellow paste to dull her hide.
    She lay on her side, her head on the ground and mouth slightly open. I reached up and touched her face. Her skin felt much cooler than usual, and that was saying a lot, since, as a reptile, she had cold blood.
    At my touch, she stirred slightly, and I thought she might awaken, but she didn’t. Instead, her body seemed to wilt, if that were possible. The twitching stopped. I bit my lip, fearing the worst, but no, she took another shallow, shuddering breath. I felt her heartbeat, slow—very slow—but steady.
    Then a soft rustling sound behind me. I whirled round to face the menace, only to find Traz sitting up and rubbing his eyes. He let out a small groan, much as I had done, and that seemed to awaken Grey, who also started to stir.
    But where was everyone else? Yallick, Oleeda, and the other mages? The dragonmasters? Surely none of them would’ve just left us all lying here—the former because they were our friends, and the latter because they were our enemies.
    “Wha—what happened?” Traz asked in a tremulous voice. “Where are we?”
    “I don’t know,” I said softly, looking around and beginning to wonder if it were a trap.
    Grey seemed to have gotten his bearings and rose to his feet, his movements lithe and wary as a hunting cat. I fancied his ears pricked.
    I opened my own senses. Usually very sensitive to the life vibrations all around me—so much so that I usually had to block them out—I could feel scarcely anything. Almost as if everything were a quarter-beat out of sync. As long as I didn’t concentrate on it, everything was fine, but when I tried to get