She nearly bumped into Gauda, who was staring, wide-eyed, up into their branches. Sydney glanced around for Will, then closed her eyes, ruthlessly searching for his rather glum and unappealing mind.
She opened her eyes after a moment, wondering if Professor Seeley had actually come to his senses and rescued his student. There seemed no sign of him. Gauda said something, then repeated it with a gathering tension in her voice, before she reached out, caught Sydney’s arm, and said the same incomprehensible thing.
“I can’t understand you,” Sydney reminded her in the language they more or less shared.
Gauda pointed upward at the camos, then held out her spread fingers. Four, they said to Sydney, who gazed at them incomprehensively a moment, before her own eyes widened in horror.
“Four,” she said faintly.
“Four,” Gauda echoed, shaking her head, then added her thumb to the spread. “Five camo-dragons. I have five dragons. There are four.”
Sydney tried to imagine the morose young man actually climbing a tree and pulling himself onto a dragon’s back. “No,” she said flatly. Not even a clash of armies on top of an alp in the twilight could have terrified him more than a camo-dragon rousing at the sound.
Gauda spread both hands wide in an ancient gesture probably older than language: Then what? Then where?
A dragon spoke, a streak of gold fire, just as the battle spilled across the crest of the meadow, harsh shouts, clashing metal, elephants and humans trumpeting together under the smoky blur of huge, hand-carried torches. Dark wings spilled open; Gauda sang suddenly, fierce, searing phrases that Sydney had never heard before. A battle cry. They were war-dragons after all, and Gauda had been trained to battle. The camos took to the air, then landed in the snow, becoming white shadows glowing faintly with inner fire. Gauda said something incomprehensible again to Sydney, who understood it just fine.
“I’m coming, too,” she said promptly, and clambered onto the huge, warm, leathery back behind Gauda. Camos in battle: that was, after all, why she was there. “The War Department will love this.”
Gauda sang again. Wings of snow and dusk caught wind and rose, as the battling armies flowed down toward them, trampling a bloody swath into the snow. The camos took on hues of fire and shadow as Gauda guided them uphill. Her fighting voice, strong, fearless, and lovely, broke through the cacophony of battle, startling the attackers, who saw at most a stream of gold fire, nothing of dragons or the invisible mages. Someone sent a stray arrow in their direction, causing a furious answering billow of flame from the camos, which melted snow into a flow of gold down the slope, tossing warriors off their feet, carrying them off in an avalanche of dragon-fire and snow.
“They don’t discriminate,” Sydney breathed, “between armies. Neither do the elephants,” she added, watching one wading into battle that suddenly reared at a misaimed lick of camo-fire, throwing its rider and trumpeting furiously before its massive forefeet came down on the rider, as well as a couple of warriors heaving their swords at one another. Their screams were lost in the tumult. Gauda shook her head absently, agreeing with whatever Sydney was saying; her voice, true as beaten metal, did not lose a note in the mayhem. “But,” Sydney answered herself, remembering where and when she came from, “it’s not dragons we’ll be using as camo.”
She was silent again, hearing a change of tone in Gauda’s voice. Fire did not discriminate between armies; neither did dark. But the camos, instead of spilling their gold at anything that moved, seemed suddenly better at hitting the right army. They heard something more precise in Gauda’s singing, Sydney guessed. The camos stopped drifting, flew more closely together, and waited, maybe, for a certain phrase from Gauda. They had all been raised together, and Gauda must have learned their language along with her own as they grew.
She mulled over the complexity of it all, wondering how to translate the ancient camos, the dragon-singer Gauda, and opposing armies to the advantage of a War Department in the very far future.
The answer appeared with stunning ease and startling clarity in a splash of dragon-fire: the student-mage, Will Fletcher, on the back of the missing camo, flying toward the sound of Gauda’s voice.
It was the last thing he intended to do. It wasn’t even on the list of things he least intended, nowhere even near the things he would never ever do, like jumping off a mountain or offering himself to a hungry shark. It was the camo’s idea. He was stirring up the fire, glanced up, and saw a single eye the color of the fire, luminous, intelligent, staring down at him. His throat went dry; he froze. Then, under that small, baleful flame of dragon’s eye among the branches, he felt an odd sense of curiosity.
What magic, he wondered, was behind that eye?
The question, he realized, was mutual.
He stood motionlessly, one end of the stick with which he had been prodding the fire now being eaten by it. Wings seemed to flutter through his thoughts; he felt himself camouflaged, mirroring his surroundings; he became a tree trunk, a branch, a snowbank, a flame, even, feeling an instant of bulk and power, a dragon. But always himself, the man standing in the dark stirring the fire, and realizing suddenly that the flame charring the stick was about to eat his fingers.
He dropped it, and glimpsed the octo’s eye, deep in the dragon-mind, and then its hidden eyes, everywhere within the dragon’s skin.
I want to see everything, he thought, entranced, through your eyes.
Then see, the dragon said.
He didn’t remember moving; he was just there on the camo’s back, watching as the attacking army began to spill out of the gorge.
He heard Gauda sing.
At first it was her voice, and he between the dragon’s wings, listening.
And then it flooded into him, song rolling over him, through him, until it became his breath, his skin, his heartbeat. Be wild, it said. Be fearsome. Be fire and night, let your blood sing, let me hear you. Let your heart sing to me as I sing to you. Let your heart be flame, send it singing, flying into the face of death.
The dragon roared. So did Will, riding the fire, yelling his head off until he remembered, with sudden surprise: But I’m only human.
He felt his own body again, looked out of his own eyes at the battle lines below, lit by the dragons, by the huge fires, and by the torches pulled out of them, warriors slashing at the twilight with fire in one hand, swords streaking the air with liquid silver light and then with blood.
He thought: I don’t have fire.
But he felt an odd warmth against one knee, as though something in him hand kindled and lit. The camo-dragon, all dark shadow and flame, let loose a volley into a tangle of fighting men; they parted, shrieking, and Will saw the wild hair and beards and furs on one side, the helmets and armor on the other. Gauda’s voice swept into him again: Recognize the difference. Remember it. Protect the army we travel with. You know them, my wonderful, my astonishing beasts. See them with my eyes.
I am wonderful, Will thought, amazed. I am astonishing.
His heart swarmed, seethed with fire, kindled by that fierce and lovely voice. But he had no way to make the fire real, let it flow, stark and terrible, toward the raucous enemy.
I have no way to kill.
Below, in the glow of fire, he watched a man with a spear stalk another man on horseback, whose armor, polished bronze and silver, as well as the jewel set in bronze on his helmet, seemed to mark his high rank. He fought warriors on both sides of his horse, methodically and skillfully, as the spear-stalker, dodging one soldier, fighting another, cleared a path for himself toward the man on the horse.