Dragon's Ring by Dave Freer

even been aware that there was a gap there, but there was enough space for them to hide. The autumn sunlight was cut by a sudden shadow. Meb was deathly afraid. Wished herself invisible. The shadow passed along with the ponderous wings of the great dragon.
     
    "He's going to be really mad, soon," said Finn. "How do you feel about running, Scrap? Every bit of distance counts, and there is running water just up the hill."
     
    Meb hoped it was clean water. She could use a drink and, indeed, some breakfast. She had a feeling that it might be a while before she ate, though.
     
     
     
    Fionn had worried that she might just have given them away with the power of those magics of hers. It was plain that the child had no idea just what she was doing, let alone what surges of power she was putting out. Although it had undoubtedly been with her since birth, in humans this sort of thing usually began to flower at puberty. She would probably go on developing for several more years. Her little village had no idea how lucky it had been. And how lucky it had been not to be destroyed. That 'not here' of hers that she'd pulled down on them must have looked like someone had cut a hole in the fabric of reality. He'd been hard-pressed to weave an illusion above it, and afraid that Zuamar would notice the working. Some dragons were more sensitive than others at range. All of them were aware of it from close at hand.
     
    Zuamar would be getting a reek of it in his big nostrils now, thought Fionn, sniggering. And they'd cast a powerful illusion over themselves in leaving the town. More than a few would remember the nightsoil men. But they'd remember them as nightsoil men. Too obvious to suspect. And while those big nostrils of Zuamar would be smelling for human and dragon magic, the smell of shit would help to hide it.
     
    Fionn could have left the town as he'd come. But there was this human girl-child. He wondered just where she'd come from. She was human, all right . . . but the dragons of Tasmarin had hunted down far smaller traces of magic than that. Magic ability was heritable, and he'd thought that there wasn't much left in the gene-pool. Perhaps she was a throwback . . . but she felt as if she came from elsewhere. Whatever she was, he would have to train her somehow, or she'd create enough trouble to enmesh even him.
     
    Anyway, she was almost falling over from exhaustion. Panting like an angry centaur. They'd have to take shelter where she could believe it was safe, soon. Otherwise powers of water, earth and sky alone knew what she would do next. Well, he'd avoided the dvergar for some years, after last time. They'd probably got over it by now.
     
     
     
    Meb was gasping for breath, and her feet seemed to have lost touch with her eyes. They kept tripping over things that she knew she'd seen. And the gleeman just seemed tireless in his long easy strides. Maybe she'd just fall over. Lord Zuamar could catch her.
     
    Then she heard, or rather felt, the dragon's roar of rage. At least . . . she must have heard it. They were nearly a league from Tarport, she was sure. But it seemed to echo in her skull. She swayed, and her tired feet managed to trip her, and send her sprawling and slithering on hands and knees into the stream. The gleeman hauled her upright by the scruff of her tunic. "He's loud and he's angry," he said, grinning. "Come on. Pull your boots off, and walk in the water. Couple of hundred yards more. Can you do it?"
     
    "Ye . . . es," she panted. Really what she wanted to do was to lie down and then drink. Her spit was dry and sticky and clung to her lips. She was sweating like it was the midsummer ship-haul for careening—yet her feet were in agony. The stream-water was numbingly cold. "I . . . icy."
     
    "It comes down off the mountains," said Finn, pointing. She could just see the distant tops of the purple-blue mountains of the interior. It was a place of fear and strangeness to the fishermen, a