The Adamantine Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

she dived like this, in which case the wind almost blinded her instead. She squinted at the scattered trees below.
    ‘Fire!’ she shouted.
    Mistral spread his wings. Shezira found herself hugging scales as the dragon almost stopped in mid-air. She quickly shut the visor on her helm. She heard the roar and felt Mistral quiver, and a wall of heat washed over her. Then Mistral shuddered and lurched as he landed heavily and stumbled. Shezira felt branches and leaves tear at her armour and heard the crack of a tree trunk. The air was hot and filled with the smell of charred wood. When she opened her visor it was to see a swathe of forest floor a hundred yards long burning. The trees around her were blackened; some were broken where Mistral had smashed into them. Shezira couldn’t see whether the blast had reached the snapper. Slowly she backed Mistral out of the wreckage.
    ‘You missed him, mother,’ shouted Princess Almiri. Her dragon was already on the ground, some fifty yards away, clutching a headless snapper in its front claws.
    Shezira instinctively ducked as something huge flew right over her head, so close that she felt the wind of its passing almost lift her out of the saddle. A sooty grey hunting dragon arched up and flew over the forest, so close that its tail slashed the treetops. Again and again, its head darted down and spat out a narrow lance of fire. Then the dragon climbed, turned and came back to land next to Shezira, squeezing into the space between her and Princess Almiri. Its rider took off her helm and waved an angry fist.
    ‘That was my kill, mother!’ Princess Jaslyn bellowed and threw her helm away in disgust. ‘What do you think you were doing? You flew right into my path! Silence almost ploughed into you and your clumsy behemoth. You should have borrowed one of Almiri’s hunters.’
    ‘Height has precedence!’ snapped Shezira. She had to shout to make herself heard. Mistral was scratching at a fallen tree, rolling it over. He could smell something.
    ‘The chaser has precedence!’ Jaslyn yelled back. Silence folded his wings and took careful steps sideways, until he and Mistral were almost touching. Mistral dropped the tree, shifted and hissed, and Silence hissed back. War-dragons didn’t like being crowded. Shezira felt suddenly small. Dragons didn’t actually attack riders unless they were commanded. Being accidentally crushed to death, however, was a very different matter.
    ‘I was the chaser!’ Shezira tried to calm Mistral down. Jaslyn was right. Mistral wasn’t made for this sort of flying, and she should have borrowed a proper hunter.
    ‘Only after you practically barged me out of the air!’ Silence was baring his teeth at Mistral now. The difference in size didn’t seem to bother him at all. At least being on a war-dragon means I can look down on my daughter while we bicker.
    ‘Did you get the snapper?’ shouted Almiri. She’d shuffled her own dragon sideways too, coming close enough to distract Silence. As the eldest of Shezira’s daughters and the only one married with a family of her own, Almiri had taken to the role of family peacemaker. This always made Shezira smile, because she remembered a time when Almiri was every bit as bad as Jaslyn.
    ‘Of course I got it!’
    All around them, the other dragons were landing on the open ground and the earth trembled as each one came down. At a quick count, Shezira guessed they’d got about a third of the snapper pack, which certainly wouldn’t be enough to keep King Valgar happy. Snappers were a menace. Standing up on its back legs, a snapper was half as tall again as a man, twice as fast, and if it got the chance would happily bite your head off. They were cunning, ate anything and everything they could catch, hunted in groups, and weren’t averse to slaughtering entire villages. Dragons were by far the best way of keeping them under control, and King Valgar had been holding back from this herd just so they could have this