I couldn’t leave the eggs to be swallowed by lava. The only dragon eggs in the world, gone, and their mother with them. My decision, a wild unthinking decision, was made, and I didn’t have long. What would I carry them in? I had only the shirt on my back.

Then the shirt on my back would do.

I stripped it off and crunched as lightly as I could across the bones to the ledge, the lava now only a couple of yards away. The dragon was distracted, turned away from me, using her snout and claws to try to work her wing out of the heavy lava, flicking great clumps of it into the air. I tied the arms of the shirt together and looped it around my torso and over my shoulder to make a sling.

Farthing nudged the golden eggs down into it as the dragon roared in agony and torment.

Shivers ran over my neck, down my spine, and behind my knees in dreadful expectation of dragon fire engulfing me at any second. It didn’t come. I counted seven eggs into the fabric, and they clicked together like strong china, the shells rigid and hot against my chest.

Farthing leaped down, and we raced from the cave. I stopped to snatch up the first egg from the mouth of the tunnel and added it to the others, then looked back to see the dragon, coated in great clots of molten orange rock, only one wing free and flapping … frantic. As we left, she screamed—a racket so loud, and higher and higher in pitch. I collapsed against the tunnel wall as the unearthly shriek pickaxed through my skull. Too loud, it was too loud. My ear seemed to swell, and then the sound was only on one side of my head as the other side exploded in agony.

The dragon’s scream tailed off, but my injured ear beat like a gong, and I staggered, unbalanced, as Farthing raced ahead down the lava tube, away from the cavern. I didn’t have time to worry about the damage to my ear, I was running for my life. Smoke stung my eyes and the fabric of my sweat-soaked neckerchief sucked at my mouth, but I daren’t move it for fear the stench would choke me. There was a sharp pain in my foot, not the centipede sting but a new hurt, since walking barefoot on the bones of the cave. I couldn’t let that slow me either. The eight huge eggs were heavy across my chest, like the sacks of potatoes my aunt had made me haul from the market. I risked a glance behind me. The flow of the lava had turned into a flood of molten rock, now pouring into the tunnel, crackling and hissing, its fumes and heat racing ahead of it.

The mother dragon was alive when we left her but must have drowned in this boiling rock by now. Did she see me take the eggs, or think they had died with her? I didn’t have time for pity. If I stopped or tripped, I’d be going the same way. The lava surged and bubbled, spattering the back of my legs with scalding flecks. If I’d reached the hole in the tunnel ceiling any later, I would have been done for.