Part 4

Vidia used the hot burst of dragonfire to blow her out of its way, riding the sudden thermal to one side. She hoped her wings weren't singed, but she would've tumbled out of the sky if they had. More likely the fire had reached well behind her to turn the last fairies in line to ash. There was no time to turn and look.

A pained roar deafened her and rumbled in her chest. As she clamped her hands over her ears, she turned in midflight and flew backward, watching as Kyto came to a halt in the air. His broad leather wings flapped hard and his tail swished furiously. He turned, rubbing his eyes with the back of his scaled forearms, and golden grains of sand fell like tears.

Pixie dust, Vidia thought. Pixie dust got in his eyes.

Did dust do that to all dragons? She knew humans could use it, but maybe to Kyto, something in the magic of her dust didn't agree with something in his own magic. Maybe to him, it was just like getting a handful of real dust in his eyes.

Lowering his claws, Kyto glared through red, irritated eyes and spotted her glow in the grey morning sky. For an instant, she had his attention. His wings flapped once, twice to keep him aloft, and then he opened his jaws again.

She veered hard as the flame came at her, diving at an angle and just skirting the edge of his fire breath. Hot thermals blasted her sideways, out of range of those terrible wings that could break her with one hit. She tumbled and found her balance again, figuring out how to fly around him.

She had just steadied herself when his tail passed overhead. He wasn't stopping to bother with her, not when there was a candy feast of fairies before him.

What do to, what to do?--her mind flew as fast as her wings. Nothing came to mind. A fairy couldn't stop a dragon. She didn't dare fly close enough to his face to try to blind him again. She flew behind him, zooming along his back. He didn't just dwarf her. Each of his scales was almost as big as her, gleaming red with power and magic. What use was one fairy--?

Wait, she thought, he isn't all red.

Vidia spotted a sparkle of gold from under one of his scales. Zipping in close, she found a gold coin caught in his hide, and not just one but several scattered here and there. She caught the edge of a scale and reached under, and the extra pixie dust pouring off of her coated the coin and made it float. As she wrenched it free, she fell backwards clutching the coin.

"Kyto!" she screamed, hovering in the air. "Kyto, you worthless lizard--I have your hoard!"

Her voice was tiny. Fairy sized. Desperation and fear made her words louder, but only because the wind carried her voice along did Kyto hear her.

The dragon was a lunge from the slowest fairy when he jerked to a stop. His head whipped around as he glared in hate at her and the coin. Of his thousands of treasures and coins, he recognized that one piece in her hands. It was smaller than a single one of his claws and should have been insignificant compared to the rest of his treasure. But Kyto was a dragon, and dragons are greedy.

"Give it back," he growled. Flames curled out of his mouth.

With his eyes locked on her, she couldn't speak. The words choked in her throat. His body blocked out the sun, looming like a mountain over her. She flew backwards and clung to the coin like a lifeline. He wouldn't swallow her if she was holding it, would he?

Roaring, he came at her with maddened eyes and blooded fangs thrust forward.

She screamed and fell like a stone, feeling as if fear had gummed up her wings. She felt Kyto above her, felt the air growing heavier and heavier, and if she didn't fly faster then she would be squashed and nothing would be left but a faintly glowing coin.

She darted left, changing direction so suddenly that Kyto overshot her and had to waste seconds flapping hard to catch up. It was a trick she used while racing dragonflies, but only when she was tired and on her last reserves. She shouldn't have needed the trick for hours yet, not covered in this much fresh dust.

"Faster, faster, faster," she ordered herself, trying to trick away her fear. "He's just an oversized dragonfly."

And if she didn't look behind herself and ignored the smoldering heat that kept swooping closer, she could trick herself into believing it.

Every time he came close enough to breathe fire, she turned again, using her tiny size as her only advantage. He was surprisingly fast. If she had thought she would survive this, she knew she would've had nightmares about it.

She darted down for a second, then straight up, and her maneuver nearly plowed Kyto into the flowery field. He saved himself by agily swinging his tail end under himself and slicing the tulip blossoms neatly from their stems, but the move gave her a few more seconds and saved her life as shock brought her to a standstill.

From this angle she could see the glowing line of fairies in the sky, and it had barely moved. Had the chase really only lasted a moment?

Kyto's frustration made him try to breathe fire instead of suck her in with a sharp breath. She heard the spark of flame and flew off again, sprinting out of reach.

Flying in the field would only get her killed faster, she thought. She had to slow him down somehow. Knowing her idea could kill her, too, she charged into the forest, flying so fast that the trees turned into a blur that was smashed to pieces as Kyto followed at her wingtips.

She'd never flown so fast through the forest. A twig struck at this speed would crush her crystal-delicate bones. A thorn would rip her in half. Just clipping a leaf would send her spinning or shred her wings.

None of those fears slowed her down. Now that her wings were warmed up, she kept evenly ahead of Kyto as he crashed through every tree trunk and branch in his way. She didn't think of how much it would hurt to see her favorite racing courses destroyed and didn't wonder if the animals had run away or were hiding and dying around her. For now, all she cared about was winning this race.

"I can do this," she thought, zipping under an acorn, a hanging vine and a low bunch of leaves in the time it took to think it. "I can do this all day--"

Kyto's fire jetstreamed toward her, so close that her back felt scalded without being touched. She dropped down before realizing that ducking wouldn't work, and as she veered left, she avoided a spider's web and the tall grass by sheer luck. She had thought that Kyto would take longer to catch up through all the trees between them, but instead the dragon caught the biggest tree trunks in his claws and used them to pivot, slingshotting himself even faster.

She had no choice. The forest was no advantage either. Vidia shot up through the canopy of leaves and changed direction, hoping he wouldn't spot her immediately.

He ripped a hole in the trees and looked around, seeing a tiny sparkle of pixie dust to his left. He roared and continued the chase.

Vidia clutched the coin tighter and knew this was it. She didn't have to worry about growing too exhausted to fly. He would eat her long before that happened. All she could do was fly as far as she could from the rest of the fairies so that more of them could get away when he devoured her.

Her sour plum tree was in sight. All alone on its cliffside perch, it stood among tangleweeds and sprinting thistles, as inhospitable and unwelcoming as she could make it look. In a moment, she would fly past it and Kyto would obliterate it with his wings.

Tears pricked her eyes. She couldn't bear that. At least she could be dead before that happened, before her lonely sanctuary was destroyed.

She angled down, following the cliff's wall to the ocean, flying above the cold spray as the waves beat the rocks. The watery chill cut away Kyto's burning heat that smoldered over his scales, and the roar of the water drowned out his bellows. The icy ocean was a pleasant mercy.

When she spotted the dark shape neat the waterline, her heart lifted. A cave she hadn't seen before--she'd never cared to fly this way, always afraid of getting her wings wet. Wet wings meant that she would drown, but wasn't that preferable to burning to ash?

She didn't have the luxury of timing her flight to avoid the waves that rolled around the cave, but speed and a little extra curve on her turn let her slip in between the white crests of water. Spray damped her wings, but they dried off quickly as her wings hummed.

There was no way to tell how far this cave went. Her glow and the flames spilling over Kyto's jaws were the only light, and she dodged dripping stalactites and falling drops of water, sometimes rolling hard on one side so that her wings missed the jutting stone.

The cave was closing in. The ocean hadn't cut this cave far and the rough walls were cramping tighter and tighter. Kyto filled the cave behind her, and his terrible red glow swallowed her light. Just moments now...

Her last conscious thought was of blinding white sunlight and a blast of air that drowned every noise, and then everything was dark.

*

Clarion saw Vidia and Kyto enter the cave. As the queen, she should have been too far ahead to see the chase, but she couldn't bear flying in front of any fairy, and so she was the tail end of the trail. If Vidia died while distracting the dragon, Clarion would have followed soon after.

From this height, she couldn't see something as small as a fairy. She had to watch Kyto and judge from his missed snaps and clumsy turns what direction Vidia had turned. The race was almost too fast to judge even from the sky. Watching the forest crumple in broad rows and ignite in patches, seeing the animals fleeing from the edges, made her heart ache, but every inch of ruined land was an inch that Vidia was still alive.

And then the way Kyto burst up suddenly from the green cover had frozen her in a spike of horror. Had he swallowed her mean tempered fairy so quickly? No, he'd turned and set off again in a moment, and then disappeared at the cliff.

Not thinking of her own safety, Clarion flew closer to see. For a second, she'd thought Kyto had flown straight into the ocean--only as she descended did she see the dark hole of the cave. Long seconds went by until she could no longer bear not knowing.

Desperation drove her the rest of the way down. The early morning left her cold, and the waves sent up spray that chilled the air worse. She hugged herself and edged as close as she dared, waiting for a sound, a sign, anything.

There was nothing. She looked down the coastline to see if the cave opened up anywhere, but the miles of rocky terrain were barren and jagged.

"Do you see her?"

Clarion seized up tight and her hands dug into her arms. As she gasped for breath, she glared at the fairy who had snuck up behind her. Rhia didn't notice the glare. She stared with wide eyes over Clarion's shoulder at the cave.

And not just Rhia. It seemed like half of the Hollow had followed Clarion here, and the rest of them were slowly noticing and trickling back from the sky. The queen groaned, but there was no way she could speak loud enough to order them all to keep evacuating. Even if she could, if Kyto burst out of the cliff, none of them could outfly him anyway.

"Is she still okay?" Fawn asked.

"She could've been squished," Iridessa blurted, then quailed as her friends gave her the exasperated looks she was used to. "Or not?"

"Those caves don't go forever," Myka, a scout talent fairy, said. "We've mapped some of them. They all stop somewhere."

"So Vidia would be trapped," Iridessa said. "And so would Kyto."

"But how would we know?" Fawn asked. "I don't want to go down in there."

More and more fairies gathered around, and as the seconds turned to minutes and nothing happened, some offered ways to find out and others shot those ideas down.

"The light talents could go look."

"No way--we'd get lost!"

"We have maps."

"They'll take too long to fetch."

"The animal talents could ask a fish to go see."

"No fish wants to swim into a scary cave."

"A scout could look? They already went in before to map the caves."

"We mapped them when there wasn't a dragon inside."

"He might be dead."

"He might not be dead."

Prilla arrived in the middle of the conversation and pieced together what they were talking about. Kyto and Vidia had flown inside, neither had come out, and no one had seen or heard anything else. She listened a little longer, than quietly backed away from the crowd. Sometimes not being completely a fairy made her do things other fairies wouldn't dream of doing.

She left the glowing throng of fairies at the cliff's edge and flew down toward the cave. She didn't want to go in either, so she first moved along the cliff to see if the cave came out anywhere.

Dozens of tiny dark holes dotted the rough stone, but none of them were very big. Most of them had bird nests inside, emptied quickly when Kyto escaped, and many chicks cheeped feebly in the cold air. She swallowed once. She'd been so busy worrying about herself and Vidia that she hadn't even thought about the animals.

Still flying, she came around the corner where the cliff opened up into a broad bay where the pirates often landed. And she stopped.

Kyto was stuck fast in the cliff.

He was still awake, straining and whumping and breathing weak fire in all directions in an temper tantrum that scorched the nearby boulders. The sand in front of him turned to glass, but he could do nothing about the stone pressed tightly on him. It looked like part of the cave had collapsed on him, and if that splash of red was anything to go by, at least one of his wings was broken and pinned.

Kyto wasn't just stuck. He was trapped as well as before.

She flew a little closer. Already worn out from his escape and chase, these last struggles wore out what little strength he had left. As he let his head collapse on the sand, he breathed out a disgusted sigh and relaxed.

Careful not to come near those jaws, she landed on the beach and looked around. Red scales littered the sand. She reasoned that they must have been knocked off when he hit the stone and then realized that the hole hadn't always been there. He'd punched his way through.

The beach was a vast field to the fairy. She hovered to cover more ground faster, trying to spot something beside a sea of red scales. They were so big that if they were in a pile, she worried that perhaps Vidia might be buried underneath--

No, there she was, Prilla thought when she saw the scrap of purple on the sand. She landed by Vidia, who lay on the damp waterline, perilously close to the rising tide. She frowned. Vidia didn't look dead, but she lay curled tight with her hands fisted near her face.

Prilla looked down at her friend's wings. Tattered beyond recognition, the edges were singed and curled from Kyto's sheer heat. She touched Vidia's shoulder and winced at how flushed her skin was. Prilla's hand left a white mark on the reddened surface.

"Are you alive?" she asked, whispering in her ear.

Vidia didn't answer, but she shivered and curled tighter, blocking out the whole world. Prilla glanced at Kyto, who didn't even notice them, then put her arms under Vidia and hauled her up. Her friend was taller than she was, making her stumble backwards, but the fast flying fairy was lighter than a feather, too. The chase hadn't used up all of her fresh dust, and the gold coin in her hands was light, too. Prilla tried to nudge it out of Vidia's grasp, but her friend wouldn't let go of the deathgrip she held on it.

Prilla carried her away from Kyto and back to the queen. The other fairies had spread out along the cliff, gingerly looking for peepholes in, but the queen was easy to spot. She was the only fairy not zipping in every direction.

As Prilla came closer, fairies started to notice her and who she carried. Whispers flew, shouts followed to other fairies who couldn't hear over the waves, and then Prilla found herself in the middle of a crowd as she approached Clarion. The fairies murmured back and forth, wondering where Prilla had found her and if they were all safe again.

"Is she...?" Clarion whispered. She put out her hand but didn't quite touch Vidia's shoulder, shying back when she saw the fading handprint on her shoulder.

"She's hurt," Prilla said. "What do we do?"

"Kyto," Clarion said, disgusted with herself that she had to ask about the dragon before anything else. "Is he alive?"

"He's stuck in the rocks," Prilla said, staring at her with wide eyes. "Please, Queen Ree, you have to save her."

At her words, Clarion's confidence rushed back on her at once. To save Vidia meant managing the fairies expertly, and that was what she was best at. She held out her hands to catch everyone's attention.

"All fairies," she called out. "Heed my voice. Healer talents, take Vidia back and spare no effort for her. She is the only reason we are all alive today. Dust talents, replace what we took and make sure the healers have all that they want and more. Baking talent fairies--Dulcie, especially you..."

While the queen continued giving commands, Aloe and Salvia, two healing talents, came and gently collected Vidia out of Prilla's arms. With expert fingers, they slipped the coin from her hands and gave it to Prilla, who had no idea what to do with it. As the healers hastily rubbed a burn salve on Vidia's skin, a third fairy, Bethesda, covered her with one of their cloaks to shield her from the wind.

"She's starting to shiver," Bethesda explained to Prilla. "A burn can do that, but she doesn't look too bad. I think she'll even keep her wings."

Instead of being reassured, Prilla bit her lip. The tiniest chance that Vidia might lose her wings--that would be worse than actually dying for the fast flier. She clutched the coin tight and followed at their heels.

The way from Vidia's sour plum tree back to the Hollow had always felt a little long to Prilla. Now it felt like the field of scorched flowers and charred trees would never end. The bright colors and the strips of gray ash blurred, and she didn't notice that they had flown into the healers' wing of the Home Tree until she bumped her head on a foxglove lamp in the ceiling.

"Pay attention," Bethesda said softly, steering her to the back of the room. "You can stay, but you have to keep out of the way."

Prilla nodded and sat down on the acorn chair in the corner, watching them ease Vidia onto a bed of cotton fluff and coax her to straighten out and lie flat. Her blackened top and skirt crumbled at the touch. Vidia didn't wake up as they wrapped her arms and legs in petal bandages, and then nudged her on her stomach and patched up her back. Her wings they left to heal on their own, adding a touch of Wing Repair to help the process along. A water talent fairy brought in a basin of water, and Salvia filled a cup and gave the sleeping Vidia a drink, gently easing the water down her throat.

With that, the healing talents left the room, giving Prilla stern orders to come get them if Vidia woke up but that it was best to let her sleep. They closed the door after themselves, but Prilla knew they hadn't abandoned her when they left the door slightly ajar and looked in every few minutes.

Prilla watched attentively for awhile, but as time passed and Vidia continued to sleep, she gave up and picked up the chair, standing it it by the bedside. As she plopped back down, she set the coin under the bed and then settled down for a long wait.

To be concluded...