The Dragons of Noor Read Free Page B

on her back. She tried to breathe, to scream, but she couldn’t.
    Swooping down again, the howling gale swept Tymm over her head.
    Hanna jumped up, clawing at the sky. “No! Don’t take him! Let him go!”
    Arms out, legs flailing, Tymm screamed as he blew over the pines. The wind drew him east above the foothills and sped him toward the sea.
    She hadn’t reached him in time. Rage flooded through her.
    “Why take Tymm?” she screamed. “What do you want with him?” She wept until her throat was raw.
    A long while later, when she’d cried herself out, she stumbled through the ravaged bushes to the shore. Thedragon’s fire had died down. Smoke rose to meet the swirling fog, brother to sister. There were no flashes of gold. The terrow had disappeared again. Hanna gripped Tymm’s grass rope, still strung about her waist. It hadn’t done any good. She hadn’t been able to save him.
    The storm had blown the Waytrees down, and the little island in the lake was strewn with wood. Even in the mist she could see the broken trees split down the middle. The trunks and branches were bone white. The deyas were gone.

TWO
OTHLORE WOOD    
    When the Waytree bridges fall
,
Roots die binding all to all
.
    —D RAGONS’ S ONG
    B one-white marble walls surrounded the meers’ school at the base of Mount Kalmeer, whose great forest grew in all directions from its snowcapped peak. The first High Meer had chosen to build his school on Othlore, for the lone isle in the western sea of Noor was a place deeply rooted in magic.
    A ray of sunlight broke through the clouds as Miles left the western gate with his bearhound, Breal, and crossed the creaking footbridge leading to the forest. It was risky to sneak outside when he should be in Restoration Magic class, but he’d heard a call coming from the Othlore Wood. A magic beckoning, he was sure. The sound had haunted him all day, though noone else seemed to notice, and so at last he’d come.
    In the green canopy, pale light fell through the boughs, painting yellow circles on the forest floor. Already he and his dog were too far in to see the school. Apprentices from every land yearned to study magic here. Few students were accepted, and fewer still earned the right to be initiated as meers, with Othic symbols emblazoned on their palms. Miles was still proud to have been chosen. He would study hard, become a meer, and someday even become the High Meer. That was his secret desire. He’d never told another soul, though he’d almost let it slip once with Hanna.
    Boughs swayed overhead, washing him in cold shadows as he crossed the spongy turf. He wished Hanna were with him. She’d understand the risk he might be taking by following the call into the woods this afternoon. But Mother and Da hadn’t let her come. They still believed in backward island ways: girls were to be at home, not gone away to school, and no amount of argument on his or Hanna’s part had persuaded them otherwise. Even knowing she was a Dreamwalker, that she’d been the only one able to rescue him last year, hadn’t made them change their minds.
    Beside him, Breal’s ears pricked.
    “So you hear it, too.” Breal looked up, brown-eyed, panting, before trotting ahead, drawn by the summons. It was a sound past human hearing, but not past Breal’s, who knew the call of magic, having lived under a curse for many a long year, and not beyond Miles’s own hearing.
    Miles hadn’t shape-shifted since leaving Enness Isle a year ago, but each animal shift had left him with a mark or gift. He bore an ugly scar on his neck from his first wolf change, and sharpened vision from his falcon shift, but the heightened hearing from his shift into the Shriker was the strongest of them all. He clenched his teeth, thinking of the Shriker: his giant bearlike body, his claws, his bloody fangs. The demon beast had killed many innocent folk on Enness Isle before he and Hanna had broken the curse.
    When Miles first arrived on Othlore,