“Ready?” called Firedrake, shaking the desert sand from his scales for the last time and spreading his wings.
“Ready!” Sorrel called.
Firedrake rose into the dark sky and flew toward the moon.
It was a fine, warm, starlit night.
They had soon left the mountainous coast behind. Darkness swallowed up the land, and ahead of them, behind them, to the left and to the right of them stretched nothing but water. Now and then the lights of a ship winked on the waves. Seabirds flew by, squawking in alarm at the sight of Firedrake.
Just after midnight, Sorrel suddenly gave a terrified shriek and bent over the dragon’s neck.
“Firedrake!” she called. “Firedrake! Have you seen the moon?”
“What about it?” asked the dragon.
All this time his eyes had been fixed on the waves below, but now he looked up. What he saw made his wings feel as heavy as lead.
“What is it?” Ben leaned over Sorrel’s shoulder in alarm.
“The moon,” she cried frantically. “It’s turning red.”
Now Ben saw it, too. The moon was indeed taking on a tinge of coppery red.
“What does it mean?” he asked, baffled.
“It means it’ll disappear any moment now!” cried Sorrel. “There’s going to be an eclipse — a moldy old eclipse of the moon! Now, of all times!” She gazed down at the crashing, foaming waves in terror.
Firedrake was flying more and more slowly, his wings beating as sluggishly as if invisible weights hung from them.
“You’re flying too low, Firedrake!” called Sorrel.
“I can’t help it!” the dragon called back to her wearily. “I’m as weak as a duckling, Sorrel!”
Ben looked up at the sky, where the moon now hung like a rusty coin among the stars.
“We’ve seen eclipses before,” babbled Sorrel, “but we were always above solid land at the time. What are we going to do now?”
Firedrake dropped lower and lower. Ben could already taste the salty sea spray on his lips. And then, in the last red glow of light cast on the waves by the fading moon, he suddenly saw a chain of small islands rising from the sea in the distance. Strange islands they were, rising humpbacked from the water like half-submerged hills.
“Firedrake!” shouted Ben as loud as he could.
The pounding of the waves tore the words from his lips, but the dragon had keen ears.
“Look there, ahead of us!” yelled Ben. “I can see islands. Try to land on one of them.”
At that very moment the earth’s dark shadow engulfed the moon.
Firedrake plummeted from the sky like a bird winged by a shot, but the first of the strange islands was already below him. To Ben and Sorrel, it looked almost as if the island chain were rising toward them from the foaming sea. The dragon fell rather than landed on the island. His riders were almost wrenched from their straps. Ben realized he was trembling all over, and Sorrel wasn’t doing much better. But Firedrake let himself sink to the ground with a sigh, folded his wings, and licked the salt water off his paws.
“Lawyer’s wig and hedgehog fungus!” Weak at the knees, Sorrel slid off Firedrake’s back. “This journey’s going to shorten my life by a hundred years — no, more like five hundred or a thousand! Ugh!” Giving herself a shake, she looked down the steep slope of the hilly island to the black waves breaking on its shore. “We almost took a very nasty dip in the sea!”
“I can’t make it out.” Ben slung the backpacks over his shoulders and climbed down Firedrake’s tail. “There weren’t any islands marked on the map.”
Narrowing his eyes, he peered into the darkness, where one steep little hill after another rose from the sea.
“That just proves what I keep telling you,” said Sorrel. “The rat’s map is useless.” She looked around her, snuffling. “There’s something fishy about this.”
“Well?” Ben shrugged his shoulders. “We’re in the middle of the sea. There’s bound to be fish around.”
“No.” Sorrel shook her head. “I mean there’s something wrong about this island — and it smells of fish.”
Firedrake got to his feet and looked more closely at the ground. “Look at that!” he said. “The island’s covered with fish scales. It’s like a —”
“Yes, like a giant fish!” whispered Ben.
“Get on my back!” cried Firedrake. “Quick!”
At that moment the island quivered.
“Run!” shouted Sorrel, pushing Ben toward the dragon. They scuttled over the damp and scaly mound. Firedrake stretched out his neck, and as the island rose higher and higher from the waves the two of them hauled themselves up by his horns. Clutching his spines, they scrambled onto his back and strapped themselves in place with trembling fingers.
“But the moon!” cried Ben desperately. “The moon is dark. How are you going to fly, Firedrake?”
He was right. There was nothing but a black gaping hole in the sky where the moon should have been.
“I must try anyway!” cried the dragon, spreading his wings. But whatever he did, his body wouldn’t rise a finger’s breadth into the air. Ben and Sorrel exchanged horrified glances.
Suddenly, with a loud snort, a mighty head shot out of the sea in front of them. It had large fins like decorative feathers growing on it. Slanted eyes flashed at them mockingly beneath heavy lids, and a forked tongue flickered between the two sharp, needlelike fangs that emerged from the creature’s narrow jaws.
“A sea serpent!” cried Ben. “We’ve landed on a sea serpent!”
The serpent’s long, long neck rose from the water until its head was hovering directly above Firedrake, who stood on the scaly hump of the creature’s back as if he’d taken root there.
“Well, well, look at this!” hissed the serpent in a soft, singsong voice. “Such strange visitors to the realm of salt and water where my twin sister and I reign supreme. What brings a fiery dragon, a small human, and a shaggy brownie girl out to sea, so far from solid ground? Not just an appetite for a supper of slippery shiny fish, I suppose?” Her tongue flickered like a hungry wild beast in the air above Firedrake’s head.
“Get down!” the dragon whispered to Ben and Sorrel. “Get right down behind my spines.”
Sorrel obeyed at once, but Ben stayed where he was, his mouth wide open, staring at the sea serpent. She was a beautiful sight, an astonishing and enchanting creature. In the absence of the moon, the only light came from the stars, yet every one of her millions of scales shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. Observing Ben’s amazement, the serpent looked down at him with an ironic smile. He was not much bigger than the flickering tip of her tongue.
“Ben, get your head down!” whispered Sorrel. “Unless you want it bitten off!”
But Ben wasn’t listening to her. He felt all Firedrake’s muscles tensing as if he were preparing to fight.
“We’re not after anything of yours, serpent,” called the dragon, and his voice sounded as it had when he rescued Ben from the men in the old factory building. “We’re searching for a place that lies beyond the sea.”
A quiver ran through the sea serpent’s body. To Ben’s great relief, he realized that she was laughing.
