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“You’ve got to go home, Ganta. It’s dangerous here. Too dangerous for a youngster who is barely old enough to fly.”
    “But I can fly, master Basil! I can fly almost as fast as my mother. And someday I’ll be able to breathe fire, too, just like her!”
    The great head shook from side to side. “Go now, Ganta. When you can finally breathe fire, then at least you’ll be able to defend yourself. That’s when you can join this kind of fight.”
    “That could be years and years!” he squealed. “This battle will probably be over by then.”
    “I certainly hope so,” declared Basilgarrad. “And now”—he backed his massive body away from the tree, preparing to leap skyward—“I must get back to work.”
    The greatest dragon in Avalon stretched his wings and gave a mighty flap, causing a rush of wind that shook every branch of the oak tree. As he rose into the sky, Ganta watched in awe. The little fellow held tight to his swaying branch, refusing to blink so he wouldn’t miss even a single stroke of those mighty wings. They belonged, after all, to the biggest creature he’d ever seen.

4: A N EW G LEAM
    Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality.
    Soaring over the battlefield, Basilgarrad seemed everywhere at once. His wing tip smashed another catapult, sending up an explosion of splinters. Then, for good measure, his claws scooped up the catapult’s supply of boulders (along with a few unwary soldiers) and dropped them on top of a column of flamelons. He plucked a young priest out of danger, only an instant before a poison-tipped spear flew through the same spot—then circled back to save the feisty squirrel who normally rode in the priest’s tunic pocket, but who had fallen out during the rescue. He slammed his tail into groups of flamelons, scattering soldiers and weapons across the grass.
    Just one swipe of that tail was all it took to destroy a pair of flamethrowers, whose metal frames buckled on impact and whose fiery cauldrons exploded into shards. The soldiers who operated them fared no better. And it took only one heavy stamp of his foot to grind all their burning bales of oil-soaked hay (plus a few more soldiers) into the ground.
    Today , thought Basilgarrad grimly, I don’t really deserve the name Wings of Peace .
    Some of the defenders whose lives he saved were so exhausted from battle that they fell limp to the ground the instant he set them down. Others reacted somewhat differently. As soon as he put down the haggard old warrior Babd Catha—whose full name, earned over years of hunting murderous ogres, was Babd Catha, the Ogres’ Bane—she started cursing him fiercely for interrupting her sword fight with six flamelon soldiers. It was as if he’d stopped her from chowing down a slice of strawberry pie, or silenced her in the middle of singing a cherished tune. Just to make sure he fully understood her outrage, she concluded her curses by swatting his gigantic chin with her sword.
    “Never do that again, ye scaly upstart!” she admonished, her brown eyes ablaze. “Now I need to go find all six of them pests an’ finish the job!”
    The dragon, who had heard many stories about this old warrior, grinned at her fighting spirit. He couldn’t even begin to guess her age, although he knew that she’d lived a very long time, possibly due to a few drops of wizard’s blood that Merlin once gave her to heal her wounds. Legends told that she had been one of the first people to help Elen, Merlin’s mother, found the new order of Avalon. And that she had started her battles against ogres when only a child, after a marauding band killed both her parents.
    He remembered something else. Some bards claimed that since that brutal attack on her family occurred in a snowstorm, the only thing in the world that Babd Catha actually feared was snow. A few went even further and said that the touch of a