Chapter 5: Escape

    Razan did not appear in Lindír’s cell for several days. Indeed, after the accident of their first meeting, Lindír was not allowed out of his cell at all. This failed to bother him for the first couple of days. Lindír, despite his enormous size, scale-covered body, and the burning rage and hunger mingled within him, was nonetheless only sixteen years of age, and thus afflicted by the emotional highs and lows of any creature at that age. Not even his natural skepticism could keep at bay the fluttering of his caged heart. The fact that Razan was a knight, and a human knight at that, mattered little when she was the only one who had promised Lindír care in many years.

    But that initial enthusiasm naturally faded with the rising and setting of the sun, and the realization that no escape was forthcoming. Razan had no doubt left long ago, deciding that she would rather not owe service to a king with a dragon locked away in his dungeons. The hunger began to speak to him once again. He should have eaten her when he had the chance, when nobody was around to stop him, should have ripped the clothes off of her back and devoured her flesh and cracked open the bones for their marrow. At least then he would have gotten a decent meal out of her. 

    And so, for the next few days, Lindír stewed in his misery, and was all the more miserable by contrast with the fluttery anticipation of the days before. It was not half so bad as the great disappointment of four years earlier, that early shattering of Lindír’s optimism having inured him to all sorts of disappointment and despair. But nevertheless, he was unhappy.

    One night, though, as the hunger gnawed at Lindír’s guts, forcing him to remain awake and still in sleepless pain, he heard something strange. It was a clicking, or a rumbling, perhaps something akin to the rubbing of metal against metal. At first, he shut his eyes against it, wondering if perhaps the hunger had finally driven him mad. It was only after several seconds that he realized that he did in fact recognize the sound and its origin; and when he did, his eyes snapped open, and he flew to his feet, every muscle rigid. The sound, though slower and softer than usual, was that of the winch slowly raising up the bronze door. 

    The raising of the door was usually a steady, mechanical process, aided by the smooth and practiced movements of the door-raisers. This time, however, it was jerky and halting, accompanied by quiet grunts of exertion, as Lindír learned when he slinked across his cell to get a closer look. The door raised up about halfway, until it was level with the upper part of Lindír’s chest, before stopping.

    “Go through. Now! This is as high as I will get it.”

    The familiar voice of Razan brought a fire to Lindír’s belly in ways that he did not think was possible. She had returned after all, it seemed. Immediately, heedless of any danger, Lindír set about squeezing himself through the gap in the door. It was no easy process. He was unused to having to compress himself, his domain being the massive and open halls of the Red Citadel, and his limbs were stiff and inflexible from lack of use besides. But by crouching down, his chin almost pressed to the earth, and awkwardly slinking forward, he was able to fit himself under the door.

    He found Razan on the other side, clad in the same casual attire as she had been wearing when he’d seen her last, pressing against the huge winch with all of her weight. Her limbs trembled with the exertion necessary to even keep the bronze door in place, and Lindír suddenly understood why she had been unable to raise it any further.

    “The door was meant to be raised by four,” he said.

    “A shame that I could not find three men willing to help, then,” she said. She began to slowly let out the chain to lower the door, careful to not drop it. The church-bell clang of the door being dropped suddenly would awake the whole of the castle. “I was too busy planning a way to distract every knight guarding the inner ward.”

    Lindír took two steps up the pathway that would lead to his freedom, but stopped to allow Razan to catch up. “How did you do it?”

    The door finally reached its destination with no more than a gentle thunk. No human would be able to hear it from far. “Various means,” Razan said, rolling the soreness out of her shoulders. “Two are in their bedchambers, thinking I will arrive at any moment. Three are asleep in their cups, thanks to a generous gift of mead. One I bribed with nearly all of my remaining silver. The last I promised I would take the place of, so that he could get a fair night’s sleep.”

    “You’re very clever,” Lindír said, taking another couple of steps toward his freedom. He did not dare move faster than that, waiting for something to go wrong at any moment. “I thought that you must have left.”

    “Even if I were not trying to free you, I would have stayed. Your father pays very well. But that is why they call me Al-Khanjar; it means ‘The Dagger’, and I am very sharp.”

    Lindír ascended the steps with Razan at his side. Sure enough, the two knights who usually stood watch at the head of the stairs were nowhere to be found. For the first time in his life, Lindír stood beneath the moonlit sky, his feet planted on packed earth, the wind licking against the tips of his wings, with no chains or ropes or muzzle to bind him.

    He took a deep breath of the cool, pure air. It was late summer, he thought, or early autumn. Several months before the coming of the frost. “What now?”

    “Fly away,” Razan said. “Before anybody notices.”

    Lindír blinked, looking down at his savior. “That’s it? Then… get on my back, I suppose.”

    “Why would I do that?”

    “So you can come with me, of course,” Lindír said. 

    Razan shook her head. “I’m not coming with you. I told you, I agreed to take your father’s coin. This is where I belong now.”

    “But you’ve freed me,” Lindír said. His voice became very soft, very weak. “You did all this to win me my freedom, and still you wish to stay?”

    “Nobody knows what I have done,” Razan said resolutely. “And if you escape now, nobody will know. It will be an innocent coincidence that I arrived just before, by stroke of misfortune, the dragon escaped. And that will be that. Now fly, Lindír!”

    Lindír’s neck bent low to the ground, and he swept his tail from side to side against the earth, a dismal groaning echoing from somewhere in the back of his throat. But he did not allow himself his emotions for long. It was unaccountable that he should be experiencing such an un-draconic emotion as sadness, and on the very brink of his ultimate triumph no less. Instead, he turned his eyes skyward. 

    At which point a problem immediately presented itself, for Lindír had never flown in his entire life. The cells in which he had lived had barely had enough room for him to spread his wings, let alone to beat them, and his sojourns into the surface had been made with the understanding that any attempt at flight, in either sense of the word, would be strictly punished. When he did spread his wings, the joints almost instantly began to ache, so unused were they to any position other than that of being folded against his sides.

    But Lindír had seen birds in flight, from time to time, and knew of how they flew. He had wings, just as did they; so why would it not be the same means by which their flight was achieved? So he spread his wings out as widely as he could and began to flap. With every beat, the motions became more familiar, draconic instinct telling him how to capture the air with each flex of his powerful flight muscles. A huge wind arose, blowing at Razan’s clothes and sweeping dust into her eyes. But although he beat his wings with all his strength, and he felt a great deal of the weight of his body suddenly lifted from his limbs, Lindír remained steadfastly tied to the soil.

    At length, he folded his wings once more, though far more loosely, and turned to Razan. “I cannot fly,” he said.

    Razan muttered something in her native tongue, and from her tone alone it could be nothing other than profanity. “Can you climb?” she said. “The drawbridges are raised for the night, but they were not meant to keep you in, only keep folk out.”

    “I… have never climbed,” Lindír said. He looked down at his hands, and at the long talons which extended from the tips of each finger. Raising one claw, he allowed himself to flex the fingers. “But I believe that I can.”

    It was at that moment that a man walked past one of the windows on the inner wall. Lindír would never know the circumstances that led to that man being there. Perhaps he found himself struck by insomnia, and so paced the corridors until tiredness took him. He may have been roused by a sense of wrongness, or because he was one of the knights whom Razan had deceived, or for some duty which he was called upon to perform. Regardless that man looked through the window and let out a cry of terror. 

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    “The dragon! The dragon has escaped!”

    All at once, the air became tense. There were some guards who were still awake, and many more who could be quickly roused either by the shout or what followed it; Lindír heard the sounds of troops arming themselves in the distance.

    He turned to where Razan had stood a moment before, seeking advice, but she had already vanished, not wishing to be seen aiding the escape. And so Lindír was left only with what she had said to him last: climb. He ran to the drawbridge and reared up onto his hind legs, finding that he could reach up to barely a quarter of the height of the raised bridge. But when he dug his claws into the wood, he found that they could easily penetrate; and so he could climb it.

    It was slow progress, rendered all the slower as the toll of the hunger and Lindír’s long captivity became clear. His muscles were small for his size, and weak, and he was not halfway up the side when his breath began to struggle in and out of his teeth. But with freedom so close at hand, closer than it had been in the entire sixteen years of his existence, Lindír once more found himself in possession of strength and will that far exceeded the limits of his physical strength.

    But when, at last, he heaved himself over the edge of the drawbridge, then swam across the moat beyond, hauling himself onto land, the path ahead of Lindír was already blocked. The knights stationed at the outer guard posts had assembled into a rough platoon, forty or fifty strong, and planted themselves at the gate separating the first ward from the second. With his exhaustion, Lindír knew that to throw himself against the wall of lance-points and axe heads which lay that way would mean only death.

    Panic grew in his breast, and Lindír’s animal instincts soon took over. He fled from the knights ahead of him and the knights behind, running for the wall near the great chapel. There, he hoped, he could climb the wall, and find some way to reach the outer berm. When he reached the foot of the wall, he leapt, as high and as far as he could, and he dug his claws into the red stone. But stone was not wood, and his claws could not produce their own divots as they had with the drawbridge.

    As a rat who attempts to climb a sheer cliff in order to escape from a raging wildfire, Lindír threw himself against the wall again and again. He attempted every technique, every exertion he could use to gain some measure of advantage. Lindír beat his wings to gain lift, he pressed against the wall with his tail, he even attempted to bite into the stone with his teeth, all to no avail. All the while, the garrison of the Red Citadel was gathering in growing force, and slowly building the courage to approach.

    At last, Lindír collapsed to the ground, exhausted beyond measure. It was a struggle merely to make his lungs pump the vital air into him, let alone to hold up his weight. He fell onto his stomach, closed his eyes, and only through an exertion of will was he able to keep himself from falling asleep on the soft grass of the second ward.

    The next thing he remembered was a heavy clunk of metal latching shut, and a sudden pressure holding tight around his jaws. In his stupor, three of the knights, possessed of a great deal more bravery than their fellows, had approached him and placed a great muzzle around his mouth. 

    At once, vigor surged. Lindír stood up, his jaws straining pointlessly against the steel of the muzzle, eyes bulging and wide as he took in what was before him. He had never seen so many knights in one place, three score of them, though many were clad not in mail but in padded coats, or even no armor at all. They were afraid, but the strength of their numbers bolstered their courage, and there was not a one who did not have some long polearm to aim at Lindír’s face or chest. 

    And behind them, a dozen arms away, was a line of another score of warriors. They were clad in strange armor, and carried bows instead of lances. At the head of them stood Al-Khanjar; her eyes were steely, her expression resolute, and no evidence showed anywhere in her countenance or in her stance that she bore any sympathy for Lindír whatsoever. But, at the very least, she gave no order to attack.

    The cordon of knights set themselves upon Lindír as a pack of wolves bears down upon a cornered elk. Even through his exhaustion, Lindír’s sheer size made his claws deadly weapons, capable of crushing a man’s ribs through even a full suit of mail. The knights knew this all too well, and being possessed of some sliver of cunning, did not rush him head on. Instead, they hung back in a great mass, just out of reach, and every once in a while a small squad of them would, regaining their bravery, venture forth. They took chains with them, and cast them over Lindír’s back so that another group on the other side could grab them.

    Lindír thrashed and roared, batting at his attackers with his mighty claws. A few fell in this way, too slow to avoid having their organs pulped, but the dragon was slow, and the knights surrounded him on all sides. Inevitably, whenever he turned his attention one way, he would find himself under assault from the other, and unable to fend them off. One by one, chains wrapped around his limbs, around his trunk, binding down his wings and trapping his limbs. 

    Many of the knights no longer felt the need to attack, but instead merely held fast to the chains and ropes in groups of five or six, pitting all their strength against Lindír’s. The more he fought, the more entangled he became, and the more his muscles weakened under the strain. It seemed as though he were destined to lose once more, to be dragged back into the pit while Al-Khanjar watched.

    A heat arose in his belly, hotter than the hottest rage, a heat to make a blacksmith’s forge envious. It was rage, it was will, it was hate and fury and determination, and the soft orange glow inside Lindír’s stomach lit up the ward like a hundred lanterns. The knights quailed before it, rippling back like reeds against a gale, but cries went up to hold their courage, and so they did. The glow intensified, brightening and brightening until it was felt not merely as heat, but as pain. Lindír’s lips pulled back in a sadistic grin, baring teeth lit from behind, and allowing embers to drip from his mouth. The twin beams of his eyes blazed in the night, pupils stretched wide, and he glared into the eyes of the dead men before him.

    Then he reared back, chains falling from the fear-weakened grips of the knights around him, and bellowed forth a fire like no other flame seen on earth. The whole of the ward glowed, lit up by yellow light brighter than the sun. Instantly, the knights broke and fled before the conflagration, but they were too late, for the flame spread out like a morning fog. Many stumbled and fell, trampled by their fellows, only for the indescribable heat to fuse their bones to the soil. Others were boiled within their armor, seared black by hot metal. The luckiest were those who became engulfed by flames, whose bodies ruptured open as blood and lymph flashed to steam, tearing forge-hot metal asunder with their terrible death throes.

    The grass around Lindír’s feet turned to ash, and the ground became carpeted with flame even many arms beyond the inferno’s touch, for the sheer radiant heat was so great as to cause plant matter to burst into flame. The earth dried in an instant, then broke down, the topsoil cracking and shattering almost down to bedrock. Even the stone of the castle wall against Lindír’s back, unused to such an impossible heat, began to grow over with webbed fractures.

    Lindír was blind from the brightness, and nearly deaf from the screams and the rumbling of breaking stone, but he could not stop his flame. It was not enough to merely kill his foes; no, he wished to be free. The muzzle, held together by heavy iron bands, remained in place. The metal became hot, then it became brilliant, and not even a dragon’s scales could hold against so hot a material pressed directly to them. As Lindír thrashed, spewing his fire across the ward, the hot metal bound to his snout dug into the scales, charred them and burned them. Down to the root, down to the flesh, down to the bone, but Lindír refused to relent. The metal grew soft. With one agonizing pull, one strain that felt as though his jaw would shatter, the heat-weakened metal finally gave. The ward was showered with hot fragments, launched in every direction with such force that they buried themselves in the earth.

    At last, Lindír settled onto all four limbs once more, the fire dwindling into mere tongues of flame rising from his mouth. For a moment, the Red Citadel sat in still and quiet. Lindír was in the center of a ring of flame, dividing the undamaged portions of the ward from the field of charcoal where his flames had done their work. And on the far side of that slowly growing ring stood a score of Namarlander warriors, bows at the ready.

    Razan stood at the head of her troops, lowering her eyes until they were level with the dragon’s. His breath heavy, Lindír looked back, waiting for the moment of betrayal and the hail of arrows sure to follow. Razan was human, was she not? 

    Only a dragon’s sight could have seen the half-nod, more of a twitch of the neck, that Razan made in Lindír’s direction. She said something in Namaric, and the archers began an organized retreat. They never turned their backs on Lindír, and did not break from their formation, but not an arrow was nocked or a sword drawn from its sheath as they pulled back to the innermost ward.

    Lindír broke into a long, loping stride as he passed through the gate into the first ward. There was chaos all around him, townsfolk only just preparing for a blaze or an invasion when they were suddenly sent into terror by the passage of a ton and a quarter of dragon. He ignored them all, weaving through the structures of the ward, his eyes set on the great berm that marked its edge. 

    A northern wind blew against Lindír’s side as he ran, catching under his wings as he ran. He half-opened them, letting the wind catch under the membranes, sensitive from lack of use. To Lindír’s surprise, the wind seemed to push up against the underside of his wings, urging him into the sky, wooing his wings upward. The unfamiliar sensation of lift awoke some ancestral memory of his, another draconic instinct, and a vague understanding formed within his muscles as to their proper use. 

    As Lindír broke from the village of the first ward, his claws digging into the steep side of the outer berm, he put that tenuous plan into action. The wings which had hitherto remained always folded against his sides pivoted down, shoulder socket rotating in a way which was utterly unknown to Lindír and yet simultaneously as comfortable as breathing. The twin claws, one on each wing, planted themselves in the earth and joined the steady beat of the four main limbs in an easy six-limbed gait.

    Lindír forgot the burning in his lungs and the pounding of his heart, forgot the stinging of the scars across his snout and the hunger that gnawed eternally at his gut. The wind was on his face, the grass racing by beneath his feet. Before him, past the top of the berm, was a sky overrun with stars. Behind him lay all that he had ever known, and all of his torment. He opened his mouth to gulp down the cold air and taste the pine forests of Hvalheim.

    Then, at the very top of the berm, with his eyes drinking in the bottomless dark before him, Lindír leapt. His front and hind limbs moved with smoothness and surety, first crouching low and then leaping high, at the same time that the muscles of his wings pushed downward like a spring, launching him into the air. Before he even reached the apex of that leap, the wings had turned upwards, and spreading to their full wingspan, beat with all of their strength against the air. Lindír soared higher, and the rushing wind in his wings would not let him set down.

    He let out a roar like no other roar he had let out before, a trumpeting sound louder than a lion, which echoed across the hills and valleys, and awoke every person within the Red Citadel who still slept. Lindír had won, finally and completely. He was free, and flew along the river with such speed that no land- or sea-bound creature could catch him. With the northern wind at his flank, his limbs feeling the cold rush of air, Lindír turned about, and set off for the woods.

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