30 - How To Hitch A Ride In Narnia
Van swallowed hard and peered back around the apple barrel.
Curled into a corner, with a heavy iron-and-leather yoke around its neck and chest, was something Van had never thought to see in all his life. Indeed, the report was that they were all extinct in Narnia.
A dragon.
It was small, to be sure—not twice Arrow's size, but Van couldn't be sure if that meant it was young, or ...
... starving.
The creature's ribs were so painfully apparent under its scaled hide that Van felt sorry for it. Its confined, ungroomed reek nearly gagged him. One of its eyes was missing, and the upper and lower lids of that sunken, hollow socket bore an unhealed gash. The other eye glared steadily and hungrily at the griffin, its gleaming iris the color of ... amber? Rubies? Emeralds? Van couldn't be certain. It seemed the eye kept changing. How beautiful, he thought.
If he'd known anything of dragons besides their apparent extinction, he might have stopped looking in its eye that instant. But the dragon had noticed him (being very attentive of motion, as most of its species was), and it now beckoned him closer with that gaze. Every dragon was skilled at charming prey, and Van didn't even realize it as he came out from behind the barrel and approached the beast.
"Van?" Arrow said. Then, though Van hardly heard it and certainly paid it no notice, Arrow called louder. "Van! Van!" Chains rattled.
"Stop, stop!" whispered a third voice. "The guard will hear you!"
The dragon's forked tongue flicked, and he gave Van his full attention, his wings folding and unfolding in the cramped space in a mesmerizing rhythm. "Yesssss, oh, yesssss. Here'sssss one who isssssn't afraid to approach me." His tongue flicked out again, between teeth near as long as the points of Van's sai. The delicate nostrils at the end of his snout flared, and he snaked his long neck from side to side. "Come, come. Sssssee what'sssss here, little sssssnack."
Van couldn't disobey that musical voice. He stepped closer, closer.
A flurry of motion sounded at Van's right. Arrow pushed into his path with a shriek at the dragon, who lunged forward and snapped viciously. Van tumbled backward and landed hard on his rear. He glared past the furious griffin, who hissed something unintelligible at the dragon.
The dragon gave a low, musical chuckle that floated through Van's brain and dissolved all rational thought. "Feathered nuisssssance." He caught Van's eye. "Come, little sssssnack. Don't mind them."
"N-No, no, no!" cried the third voice. "Stop, please stop, or they'll come and we'll all die!" Something large and smelling of horse bounded in front of them both, thin and trembling.
The dragon snapped at it, and with a terrified whinny, the creature pounced backward against Arrow's side. More chains rattled, and the two pulled back from the dragon as far as a pair of heavy manacles on their feet would allow. Arrow shuffled the creature under his wing like an oddly feline mother hen.
The dragon chuckled again, but Van looked up at last to the pale, dappled horse that had intervened.
No, not a horse.
Another thing that Narnia was supposed to have forgotten.
Van stared dumbly at the tattered wings sprouting from the creature's back. Narnia hadn't seen a winged horse since ... well, since the tales of the world's birth.
The beast plucked a feather from its own wing and pushed it at Van. "Tie it in your hair, or to your necklace if you have one. It has to lie against your skin."
"Why?" Van mumbled, still groggy.
Arrow clicked his beak. "Do it, you ridiculous land-plodder, or we'll spend all night keeping you from offering yourself up as that lizard's next lunch."
The dragon growled, menacing, but now with a note of grouchy resignation. Van took the powdery grey feather and braided it quickly into a lock of his hair, so that it rested against his neck.
In a rush, his fogged brain cleared. He scrambled to his feet, with his forgotten sai raised toward the dragon now glaring hatefully at them. "What's that all about?" he demanded.
"My kind are immune to poisons and charms," said the winged horse. "Our feathers are proof against it."
"As the crew of this cursed boat has found," Arrow muttered, indicating the places where the winged horse was missing some feathers. He clicked his beak again with outrage. "Plucked him without so much as a 'May I!' "
The winged horse bobbed his head at Van. "I'm Quill." He eyed the dragon as if he were still convinced it might try to attack again, but all three creatures were chained to iron bolts in the hull, far enough apart to prevent them reaching one another too easily ... but close enough for discomfort.
Van looked to Arrow. "How are you not ... ?"
"Mesmerized by his wiles?" Arrow finished with a sarcastic tone. The dragon gave a long hiss and turned his back on them, curling his wings and tail around himself until he lay in a supremely unconcerned ball. "My people and his have been less than friendly all our existence. We have the Telmarines to thank for wiping most of those reptiles out. While we," the griffin added with undeniable smugness, "seem to be flourishing."
The dragon eyed them over his shoulder, his one jewel-like iris gleaming in the gloom. "More of you to feed me, once I get out of thisssss ssssstinking tub. You three wouldn't be enough to pick my teeth, all together."
"I doubt you'll manage it," Arrow said, rattling the manacle around his paw. "Locks," he said to Van.
Van carefully stowed his sai in their sheaths, then tilted his head back the way he'd come. "I've tipped my weapons with poison. If everyone's got horsefeathers, how come I dropped an ogre like a stone back there?"
"Not everyone," Quill said. "Just her."
Van knew exactly who Quill meant, but the winged horse seemed to let words out in a rush like a bursting dam. "She comes down to feed that—that," Quill said, looking fearfully at the dragon, who had begun rubbing at his injured eye with a forearm as if he had forgotten them. "People, animals, spoils of battle. Anything. She took some of my feathers to keep him from doing that ... stare thing ..." Quill shivered. "But she keeps him h-h-hungry."
"So she can loose him on Cair, no doubt," Arrow filled in.
"We've got to get off this ship," Van said, searching his pouches. "Can you two fly?"
"I think so," Quill said, while Arrow nodded. "But it won't do us much good. She'll shoot us down as soon as we get into the air."
Van pulled his herbal and a small leather wallet from a pouch at his belt. "Then we need a big distraction. And by big, I mean huge." He started toward the dragon with purpose in his step.
"What are you doing?" Arrow and Quill cried together.
The dragon raised his head and studied Van with the same curiosity one gave to an unknown insect.
"Your eye's bothering you, yes?" Van said, holding up his herbal.
"What'sssss it to you?"
Without replying, Van unwrapped the herbal and withdrew his bloodweed. The dragon's nostrils flared, and his one good eye focused on Van with gleaming interest. Whether it was the herbal, or the dragon was still picturing him as food, Van didn't want to know. "You'll starve if you stay locked up in here. Even I can't see doing that to you."
The dragon's head jerked upward as he approached. "What'sssss in thisssss for you?"
"You are what you are," Van said. He tore a long scrap of cloth from his collection of bindings. "If I heal you and set you loose, you can eat anything but us. Got it?"
The dragon's eye narrowed, and he stared at Van with suspicion. His one-eyed gaze landed on the scar on Van's cheek. "No human'sssss ever ssssshown favor to a dragon in all of Narnian hissssstory."
"I'm not human," Van said.
"What are you, sssssnack?"
"Someone else who is what he is." He shook the rest of his bloodweed into the bandage and raised it with a look that he hoped meant Eat me, and you'll never escape.
The dragon gave a low, unsettling growl and lowered its head. Behind them, Arrow and Quill made nervous noises. Quickly (he still wasn't sure if the dragon weren't picturing him as lunch), he tied the bandage around the beast's head, over its missing eye.
The dragon gave a little snort, and hot wind puffed in Van's face. "Better," the dragon said in a tone of surprise.
"How did it go missing?" asked Van.
"The witch took it out with a ssssstone knife. Blinded and captured me." He growled again, and this time his remaining eye glowed red. "Too bad witchesssss tassssste awful."
"Yeah," Van agreed, opening his wallet to remove his lock-picking kit. "If she didn't, I'd ask you to eat her first."
Amid loud protests from Quill and Arrow, Van picked the locks chaining the dragon by its yoke to the hull of the ship. He then turned and freed Arrow and Quill from their manacles.
Behind him, the bony dragon gave a long, satisfied growl and opened its mouth wide. "Look out!" Arrow shouted as that toothy maw lowered toward Van.
Van gave a strangled yelp as he was jerked off his feet. The smell of brimstone stung his nose. The dragon flipped him into the air by his coat. He just missed hitting his head on the ceiling beams, then landed with a grunt on the dragon's back. He had sense enough to grab the handles of the dragon's yoke just before the beast burst through a cargo hatch and into the air. Wood splintered and went flying, and Quill and Arrow rushed up after them.