Windmane wasn’t exactly a fan of being carried around by the minotaurs, but she did appreciate how fast they were. The one holding her now was keeping pace with the other one easily. At this rate, they might reach the harpy’s house before the glowing cloud of pixies did.
It was close. The pixies arrived first, but the door hadn’t shut before Windmane’s escorts pounded up to it.
“Wait, please!” Windmane called out.
The harpy in the doorway waited, clearly unimpressed.
When the minotaurs came to a halt at a respectful distance, Windmane pleaded her case. “I need some of the pixie dust too. I can’t walk.”
“Really.” The harpy ruffled her brown feathers. “You still haven’t figured it out?”
“It’s been one day!” Windmane exclaimed. “I’m used to having more legs than this! How long would it take you to learn to hop along on one hand if your legs disappeared?”
The harpy laughed at that. “Yeah, okay.” She waved wingtip fingers to usher Windmane forward. “The pixies brought a pretty good amount.”
“Thank you,” Windmane said. The minotaur carried her through the door, having to duck low and hold the centaur-turned-human out in front of her for balance. It was a more dramatic entrance than Windmane had expected, but at least it caught the pixies’ attention.
They were darting about the room in excitement, to the delight of the harpy chicks crawling over a nest made of pillows. One adult harpy was doing her best to keep the children from swatting them out of the air, while the other was left her position at the door to join the second human in the room.
Beak didn’t look overly pleased at the interruption. She urged the cluster of pixies with the bag of pixie dust to get on with it. They untied it quickly and began sprinkling glitterdust over her head.
At Windmane’s polite request, the pixies agreed to do her next. The minotaur wisely set her down first — on the sturdy table rather than her own feet — then stepped well back. Windmane held her breath while the magical dandruff rained down in a sparkling rainbow. She’d never come in contact with pixie dust to this degree, and knew precious little about it, but she did know not to breathe it.
She heard Beak’s laughter a moment before the dust took effect. The harpy-human was already up near the ceiling, trying to flap her arms like wings and succeeding only in looking silly. The pixies flitted about, offering advice.
Then Windmane was floating upward, as buoyant as an apple in a river.
“Think of where you want to go!” said a tiny voice in her ear. “You control it with your thoughts!”
“It helps to look in the direction you want to fly,” added another.
Windmane did her best. She was halfway to the ceiling, but when she looked at the far wall and thought hard about moving toward it, she did. Far too quickly.
“Ah!” she yelped as she stopped, inches from the wall. She uncurled from the defensive ball to find a helpful cloud of pixies all giving contradictory advice.
One of the adult harpies called from ground level, “All right, time to take it outside!” Before the harpy could reach her own door to open it, the pixies were there in a swarm, working together to lift the latch and woosh outside. They chattered encouragement for the two humans to follow them.
Windmane doubted her ability to make it through without hitting the doorframe. Beak held no such inhibitions. Familiar with flying of a different sort, the should-be-a-harpy zoomed forward with a piercing bird cry. Windmane floated carefully after her, with the two towering minotaurs and one of the harpies trailing in her wake. The hatchlings chirped in disappointment.
Flying turned out to be less tricky once she got a feel for how precise the control could be. Thinking hard about going somewhere meant she went there fast. She almost crashed into a couple stone walls that looked exceptionally painful. But while the minotaurs kept watch like careful bodyguards, Windmane figured it out. When she finally drifted forward at a walking pace, at something approaching her regular head height, they even applauded.
Windmane smiled in relief. When she broadened her attention to the world at large, she realized that Beak was nowhere to be seen, and neither were the other harpy or the pixies. By the sounds of it, they had all flown off to the celebration grounds. Orcs were laughing heartily.
“Should we go join everybody else?” Windmane suggested. The minotaurs nodded in unison and strode forward. Windmane drifted at their pace, a few steps to the side, until the party came back into view.
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Beak was looping through the sky while the harpies showed lukewarm approval and the orcs clearly thought this was the best thing they had seen in a while. One caught sight of Windmane approaching, and urged her to try some acrobatics too.
“No thank you,” Windmane said, coming to hover next to Stomp and the rest of the minotaurs. “Flying isn’t my idea of fun. I just want to be able to move around.”
The orc shook his enormous head. “You don’t want to swim through the sky? Looks fun to me. Hey glowbugs, got any more of that stuff?”
Before Windmane could object that no, she needed that bag of dust, the pixies were happily volunteering to dump some on the orc too.
His laughter shook the field when his feet lifted off.
Then the orcs were all clamoring for a chance, and Windmane’s protests were lost in the chaos. Short moments later, the bag was empty and most of the orc delegation was up in the sky, jostling each other playfully and pretending to swim.
Beak swooped down, arms spread as if they were wings, and landed beside Windmane and Stomp. “They said this wears off pretty quickly,” she said with a frown. “I am more than a little disappointed. Twig, why didn’t you stop them wasting it?”
“Huh?” the human pixie looked over from where he was cheering on the orcs. “Wasting what?”
“The pixie dust!” Beak said. “There’s no more for us when this wears off!”
“Oh.” He looked down, apparently not having considered this. “We can get some more! Right, everybody? There’s got to be more that won’t be missed.”
A swirl of anxious pixies converged to discuss it. Windmane couldn’t make out the words, but she didn’t like the tone.
Twig emerged from the cloud. “Okay, so,” he said, “That was all of the spare dust they could scrape together. But! If somebody wants to pay for it, there’s more that’s waiting to be sold.”
“How much?” chorused Beak and an orc floating upside-down above them.
“Umm?” Twig looked back at his fluttering kinfolk, some of whom appeared to know more about the business side of things than he did.
He named a price, and the haggling began. Windmane stayed out of it, since she didn’t have any money with her. She regretted not grabbing her bag of possessions out of the cart before getting dragged off to meet the dryads. She’d had no way of knowing that she wouldn’t be back.
But Beak was bargaining on her behalf — a little surprising, really — and the minotaurs were offering to chip in if needed. It was almost enough to make Windmane tear up. This wasn’t her herd, but they were helping even so.
A deal was struck for what amounted to as much pixie dust as the swarm could carry back on short notice. They did an aerial dance of agreement, then shot off into the distance, leaving none but Twig behind.
He looked like he was trying not to be lonely. But before Windmane could offer comfort, he shook it off and returned his attention to coaching the orcs through the sky.
A flare of silver wings on the far side of the balancing rocks caught Windmane’s attention. The young dragon was trotting away from the festivities, looking into the distance.
Windmane was about to ask to be carried in that direction before she remembered she could do it herself. She tapped Stomp’s shoulder, pointed, then floated up to a level between harpy head height and the orc danger zone. They were starting to pick up the padded sticks from earlier. Windmane flew past very carefully.
When she made it past the crowd, she could make out the speck in the sky that the silver dragon had seen already. It looked like someone on a flying carpet.
“Is that the dragon?” asked Stomp. The rest of the herd trampled up behind her.
“I think so,” Windmane said, squinting. “Your eyes are as bad as mine.”
They didn’t have long to wait. The flying carpet showed some impressive speed, coming in for a precision landing that sent a wash of air towards the onlookers. A squeak said Twig was there too, getting his hair blown about, but the harpies had stayed at the festivities. Windmane didn’t bother to look. The dragon was back.
The young one greeted him first, with a tilt of their sinuous neck that bared their throat. “It’s good to see you, Mentor!”
The older dragon in human form got off the carpet and responded with a regal nod. “And you. Is the last of the group still here?”
“Yes. She is currently flying with pixie dust among the orcs.” The young dragon pointed. Windmane glanced back at the sight that the elder was seeing for the first time; it was still a riot of flight and mock battles.
“A lot of that going around,” the elder said drily. “But they’re all here. Good job keeping an eye on them.”
“It wasn’t easy,” the youth admitted. “The harpy jumped off a cliff.”
“Then very good job. You do me proud.”
The young dragon beamed at that, tail swishing like a happy cat.
“You can give me the details later,” the elder said. “For now, plans. I’ve taken a look at the island where our targets are supposedly hidden away for the next few days; we just need to get there and apply pressure.”
Windmane had some doubts about that, but she kept quiet.
Stomp spoke up. “If we’ve got a few days, that’s a relief. Do you need to rest? Have you been flying all night?”
The dragon shook his head. “I slept.”
“In a bed?” Stomp pressed.
“In a bush,” the dragon said with a snarl. “In the better of two public parks, with my carpet and one of the remaining charges in my limited-use invisibility charm. I’ve had worse. Ready to hurry back.”
“How do we do that?” Windmane asked. She looked to Twig. “Will this dose of pixie dust last long enough for Beak and me to fly there?”
Twig looked alarmed. “Oh! Uh, no. Really shouldn’t bet on that. This was extra dust, remember, the stuff that’s almost expired, and meant for skyfruit fertilizer. You’d fall out of the sky.”
Windmane sighed in disappointment. “Great.” She was just getting used to floating without touching the ground. “I guess we have time to wait for the pixies to come back with more? It took something like four hours before.”
The dragon shook his head. “We should start moving now,” he said. “That’s time we can’t squander.”
“How, then?” Windmane demanded. “Does that carpet hold five people? Cuz I’m pretty sure you said three would be pushing it.”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” asked the dragon. He pointed at the shenanigans in the sky. “Those orcs came here by boat, yes? What do you think it would take to convince them to take passengers?”