But she had. Lightened by privation, driven by desperation, knowing it was her final chance, she had leapt, beating her wings. And flown again.

It took all her concentration to keep to her path. Each stroke of her wings now demanded a conscious effort and an iron will as she defied both pain and weariness to drive herself on. Soon she would have to divert from her course and find something to kill and eat. Only then would she allow herself to sleep. Already her body nagged her with weariness. She wanted to stop now but every day she flew less and rested more. One day she would not be able to rouse herself and make the immense effort to rise once more to the skies. If that day came before she reached Kelsingra, then she would die. And dragonkind would die with her, her immature eggs never laid. Ever since she had seen the incompetent weaklings that had emerged from the last serpents’ cases, she had known that she was the sole hope of her race.

Until, that was, the single arrow of a treacherous human had doomed her dreams. Sometimes, as now, when the pain blossomed brighter and brighter in her side and made every muscle in her body ache with its echoes, she took refuge in hatred. She fed it with plans and dreams of how she would take vengeance on those humans, how she would return to Chalced when she had her strength back, to sear their paltry cities with dragon fire and dragon might. She would kill hundreds, thousands of them in her revenge, and teach them forever-more to fear the wrath of a dragon.

With every downward stroke of her wings she renewed her vow to fill the streets of those cities with screaming humans.

Kelsingra. Not far now, she promised herself. Much farther than Trehaug, true, but she could make it. She could because she must. Sometimes, just as sleep claimed her, she heard the distant dragons. They had found Kelsingra, and created Elderlings for themselves and wakened the city. Awake, she could not reach their minds. It was only when she was on the verge of exhaustion that their distant thoughts intersected with hers. Once she had even thought that Malta reached out to her, her thoughts full of anxiety and reproach. She had tried to respond to her Elderling, tried to command her to be ready to serve her dragon. But awake, the pain fogged her mind and made tasks as simple as flying and hunting challenges for her. Still, that their thoughts could brush hers meant that it could not be much farther.

At least the rain had stopped for a time. At least she was not flying against the wind. Such small comforts were all she had. She beat her wings steadily but flew lower over the river, watching for game, and thus heard the cacophony of sound before she saw the source. When she saw the two boats below her, she knew a moment of fury. The two vessels were locked together, their crews shouting at one another and throwing each other into the river. Not a hunt for meat, just killing each other, as usual. Noisy, useless, smelly humans! Their uproar would have driven all game from the area. Just when she needed her hunting to be effortless, they had complicated it. No game of any size would venture within earshot of their useless squabbling. If she could have spared the energy, she would have circled back and spat venom at them for the trouble they had caused her. She flew low over them, hearing their cries as the wind of her passage rocked both vessels. As she did so, she caught a scent that lifted her hearts.

Dragon venom.

Grunting with the effort, she banked her wings and circled back. Yes. There were acid runs and scorches on the deck of one of the vessels. It was clearly the work of an angry dragon. Or dragons? She took a long snuff of the air as she passed over the ship. Possibly more than one. Certainly it was not the work of IceFyre. She knew his rank musk well. No, the vengeance below did not reflect his temperament either. The boat still floated and the crew had been allowed to escape. Not IceFyre, then. Other dragons. Other dragons that could fly! Fly, and spit acid fire. Real dragons. Hope blazed up within her and she resumed her course, her will to ignore the pain and live reinforced. Other dragons. Her dreams had steered her true. Other dragons lived and flew in the sky over Kelsingra. A future awaited her.

She followed the river, leaving the humans and their noise behind, around a lazy bend and then on, until she came to a long muddy spit covered in winter-dead rushes. Fortune favoured her in the form of a herd of river pigs that had emerged from the water to snout and dig in the rushes. Some ancient memory or perhaps a more recent experience alarmed them as her shadow swept over them, for they squealed and began to rush back toward the water. She answered their squeals with a scream of her own, expelling pain and hunger as she banked far too sharply on her injured side. She more fell than dived on the herd, coming down with every taloned foot extended wide. Her chest hit a large pig, pinning him to the muddy bank, and her left claws raked another wide open. With her right she convulsively seized an animal, pulling it in close to her body and uniting its squeals to the cries of the one trapped under her chest. Her eyes spun with red fury at the pain it had cost her to make her kill, and she savaged the two trapped pigs to a messy death, tearing them into pieces.