When Dragons Came Chapter 2: Calling a Storm

For several minutes after the dragon had passed overhead, I hid in the bracken on the bluff overlooking the destruction the beast had wrought, but when it showed no sign of immediately returning, I wondered if I should go down and see what could be done to help Rilla.

If only she weren’t surrounded by soldiers! What were they all doing down there?

Not putting the fires out, unfortunately. Did they want the entire farm to burn?

They probably did, come to think of it. Burned farmland wasn’t worth half as much as a thriving prosperous farm, and the king had been pressuring Khan’s family to sell for more than a year now. If the king even needed to pay, now that Khan, his father, and his brothers were all dead, even the babies.

Still, I would have thought the soldiers would put out the fires for their own safety. Already, flames grew to their north, west, and east, cutting them off from the river. If they weren’t careful, they’d soon be surrounded by walls of flame.

Even if they didn’t care about the good farmland, they ought to care about their own lives. And Rilla’s. If she was still alive. Near as I could tell, she hadn’t moved since the dragon dropped her. Yet none of the soldiers seemed in any hurry to move. They’d be trapped soon. How could they not see it?

Maybe they didn’t realize fire was closing in from all sides because they didn’t have the view from above that I did.

I should warn them, but I felt almost as afraid of the soldiers as I did of the fire.

You could help them without them knowing, Neli a quiet part of my mind nudged me.

Don’t be absurd, I answered myself. Sure, my dad called me his rainmaker, and maybe I imagined I talked to clouds, urging them to bring us much needed water, but the inferno developing below me didn’t need a little sprinkle—it needed a veritable storm.

And there wasn’t a cloud in the sky to talk to.

Well, maybe one—a tiny wisp of a thing, far off to the south. It didn’t look like it held any rain at all, even if I could persuade it to come our way.

But the fire had completed its loop. And I’d seen enough death today. I couldn’t bear another—even a soldier’s death—if there was anything I could do about it.

“Lord, help me,” I prayed.

Then, gently, as if coaxing a stubborn sheep, I mentally called out to the cloud, begging it to gather water, to come my way, to douse the burning farm.

At first, nothing at all happened except that my whole body began to ache as if I’d run uphill for hours.

“Please, we need you,” I whispered to the cloud.

Wind whipped up, blowing hard from the south, and slowly the cloud came my way, gathering water as it came, getting first larger, then darker, until by the time it stopped overhead, it was dark as night and blotted out the sun.

Lightning flashed with a great crack, and rain poured down—none too soon. Down in the valley, the fire had reached the edge of the forest on the village side, and was pushing both outward toward the people I cared about and inward toward the soldiers.

Those fools shouted when the downpour hit them, as if somehow getting wet was worse than the flames. Didn’t they realize the danger they were in?

They should have been thanking me—or the storm and the Creator who brought it—not cursing the downpour.

Ah, well. I didn’t want them noticing me up here, anyway. I’d just wanted to put out the fires quietly, which calling the storm had done—or would soon do, and I was glad.

Mostly glad. I couldn’t be completely content seeing how the ache in my body had grown, and all my life force seemed to be draining from my body, just as the water was draining from the cloud.

Was this what it felt like to die?

I didn’t want to die.

But if that’s what it took to put out the fire…

I sunk to my knees, thanking the cloud and the Creator for listening to my cry.

Even more life force drained out, and I crumpled all the way to the ground.

At least I was still in the bracken, so if that dragon came back, it might overlook me.

Maybe.

I could only hope.

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