1
ANDREAS
The village wasn’t very impressive, but the humans were building.
Encroaching.
More and more every year, they tried to take every single inch that had once been dragon lands.
At first, I’d been hard-pressed to hate them for it. We as a race had enslaved them, and we’d deserved for them to rise up against us. My father had always called them sub-dragon and said they were like children who needed to be told what to do, but he’d been a jackass.
I hadn’t even mourned when he’d been killed by the very humans he’d sought to enslave.
But my own small band had broken away from dragonkind well before the humans had risen up. We lived on our own, cared for ourselves, and stayed in the far reaches of the northern plains, where we couldn’t possibly offend anyone. All we had wanted was to live our lives without hurting anyone or being hurt by them in return. Sometimes, when humans fleeing dragons had come through the area, we’d hidden them fromdragons and their servants, because everyone had a right to live their own damn life, and owning anyone was abhorrent.
But in the years since the humans had overthrown dragons, they’d been breeding in numbers incomprehensible to us, and spreading across the land like a spilled cup of wine, seeping into every corner and cranny. They made no distinctions between dragons who had been slavers and those who had not.
And now they had come to our tiny bit of the world. They’d settled in the valley beneath the mountains and started building a village there.
In the spring, they had come across my sister while she’d been hunting goats at the foot of the mountains, and killed her. We had found her body hacked to pieces as a gruesome warning to us.
All I had left of her now was a single egg, the first she’d ever laid, that lived on in my carefully tended fireplace.
After we lost her, we had moved far to the east, into the caves on the rocky shore many leagues away from the humans, but still, I worried.
What would stop them from moving even farther east and taking the caves from us too? From killing my niece or nephew if I managed to hatch them?
Not that hatching the egg was a certainty.
I’d never hatched an egg before. I only had the vaguest idea how such a thing even worked. I knew I needed to keep it as hot as I could. Eggs could only thrive in the warmth of a dragon’s fire. That was the extent of what I knew. Hundreds of years old, and I’d never had a hatchling in my clan.
“They’re building huts,” Harri said, looking behind himself as he marched into my cave. It sounded like part of an argument rather than an announcement to me, but somehow, he still managed to answer thoughts I’d been having right at that moment. “We have to do something.”
He looked back to me as Gareth and Bran followed him in, both looking just as concerned as he was.
Still, Gareth was always the voice of reason. “What can we do? We don’t want to be as bad as our ancestors, and commit violence against people just for existing. Everyone has a right to live.”
Harri scowled at him. “Like they had a right to kill Eilonwy?”
“They probably thought they were defending themselves. We earned this reputation, Harri. Humans have a reason to fear us. They?—”
“I haven’t earned anything. I’ve never hurt a human in my?—”
“Enough!” I shouted them down. They all turned to me, Harri still looking petulant, while Gareth and Bran seemed relieved not to have to continue the argument.
It was . . . well, it was uncomfortable was what it was. We’d left home as children, all of us hating with the way dragons lived. All the drama and backbiting, and most of all, holding an entire race of people as property.
But that meant that we didn’t have a leader.
We had all fallen into the habit of doing as Eilonwy ordered because dragons were traditionally matriarchal and she’d been the only woman among us. Since her death, the others had taken to looking at me as leader. I was the oldest by a few decades, and, I suspected, they were treating leadership as hereditary, which it had never been in dragon clans.
Still, my mother had been a leader among dragonkind, and then my sister, so I was now the closest thing we had to a leader, even if it was the last thing I wanted.
“The humans who came to the coast to fish are building huts,” Harri said after the silence had gotten awkward. He was pouting.
I understood, to a degree. He was the youngest of us. He hadn’t spent as many years watching the way our people hadtreated humans. He didn’t truly understand why the humans were angry with all dragons.
After all, he personally had never victimized any of them.
