His throat worked convulsively and then a huge gout of black vomit sprayed from his mouth.
The Healer and the Head Master jumped back instinctively and the dragons’ hissing got even louder.
Then I saw something awful—something I never could unsee. A long, wormy mass started coming out of Chud’s mouth. It was stained black and it just kept coming and coming and coming, piling up on his chest as he choked and gurgled and heaved over and over again.
And then I understood what it was—Chud wasn’t just vomiting the contents of his stomach—he was vomiting up his organs. Somehow his intestines were coming out of his mouth, heaped in glistening black piles all over him and around him.
“Oh God and Goddess,” I moaned and turned to press my face to L’eesha’s arching golden neck.
“he is dying,” she said sadly and nuzzled me comfortingly. “how awful for his dragon to lose her rider!”
And then, with a last heave that seemed to wrack his entire body, Chud was still. I watched in horror as he went limp, collapsed in a pool of black vomit and the shiny piles of his own internal organs.
At last, the dragons stopped hissing. Apparently the threat was now dead and their warning was done.
“Stay back, all of you!” Professor Zephyr called in a loud, clear voice. “Don’t touch him—he’s very contagious.”
Everyone seemed inclined to obey her but the Head Master, who was weeping openly now. I had never seen him display such emotion and honestly, I doubted if anyone at the Academy had.
“He was my son!” he shouted at her when she put a hand on his arm to keep him from going to Chud. “My son and you didn’t save him!”
“You can’t save the victim of a Madling bite,” she said patiently. “I’m sorry, Head Master—there was nothing I could do.”
At that moment, Chud’s Green dragon, who had been nosing him anxiously, threw back her long neck and began to keen.
It was a heartbreaking sound—the sound of a dragon mourning for its rider—a high-pitched wailing I knew I would hear in my nightmares for nights to come.
Then, before the Head Master could go to him, Chud’s dragon got to her feet and carefully gathered his body into her forearms. Awkwardly, she took off, flapping her wings to rise from the Flight Terraces, leaving only a black puddle behind to show where he had been.
“Where is she taking him?” I asked—I had never seen or heard of anything like this before.
“to the Burn Pits,” L’eesha said sadly. She was keening now too—all the dragons were. It was a sound of hair-raising desperate sorrow that came from all sides and made my skin shiver into chill bumps.
“To the Burn Pits?” I echoed, still not understanding.
“she will fly as high as she can and then dive them both into the lava,” L’eesha explained. “that way the Madling madness will be burned away so it can’t sicken anyone else.”
She sounded unusually sober and grown up. I wondered how she knew such things. Was it instinctual?
“some is instinct,” I heard her say and I realized she must have caught my unguarded thought. “the Madlings are our natural enemies, you know—it’s one reason the humans started bonding with us—because they saw us flaming them out of the sky. but also, the other dragons tell me things. and every dragon knows what to do when his or her rider dies.”
She nudged me with her huge head, which was twice as big as I was by this time.
“my Auri, promise me you won’t die for a long, long time,” she pleaded. “promise you won’t let a Madling bite you or anything else happen to you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told her, stroking her long nose soothingly. “You and I are going to be together for a long, long time sweetheart.”
But as I did my best to soothe my dragon, I only hoped that I was telling the truth. And I couldn’t get Chud Larson’s last words out of my head.
“They’re coming!” he had been shouting and I could only imagine who “they” might be.
63
AURORA
“It’s the Madlings—he must be talking about the Madlings,” Ryse said grimly, when I told him later what I’d seen. “Chud Larson must have found a forgotten pocket of them in a cave in the Western Mountains somewhere.”
“You really think so?” I asked, feeling sick.
