The Dragon Round (18 page)

2

Everlyn can't lie in bed anymore. She opens the shutters in her room and the common room and watches Jeryon lead the wyrm around the pond. They wave to each other. For the first time, it strikes her: He'll really be able to ride Gray. They're so easy together.

He looks ridiculous in his new clothes, of course, like someone going to a masquerade as a dragon. She shouldn't mock, though. She's shortened her smock considerably and taken off much of the sleeves to use the fabric to fix the rest. Her undergarments are a ruin. Going without them, though, even if he didn't know, is entirely out of the question. Beetles get everywhere.

She joins them as they pass the cabin and walks with them to the pond's outlet stream.

“Tea?” he says.

“Shouldn't be more than a moment,” she says.

He loves her tea, especially when she puts a shega jewel in it. Who
would have thought that tea would be what could please him? He once told her he didn't think he deserved cooked water.

The wyrm flaps and screeches, “Eeee!”

“None for you,” the poth says.

A bird flies by, and the wyrm leaps toward it. Jeryon checks her, and they watch it disappear into the canopy. He gets a look in his eye and says to Gray, “I know a game we could play, but we'll need more crab.”

“What is it?” Everlyn says. She relishes that too rare look in his eye. The dragon has a rambunctious effect.

“You'll see,” he says and hands her the lead. “Back in a minute.” He retrieves an empty crate and hurries downstream to the flats.

Everlyn gets a look in her eye. She waits until he disappears, then whistles twice. Gray sits and licks her. Slowly she straddles the wyrm and puts a little weight on Gray's shoulders. Her tiny dorsal spikes are blunted by her smock.
She's like a rocking horse
, the poth thinks. She settles herself. Gray pushes up.
So much poise
, the poth thinks,
as if she's already in flight
. Everlyn lifts her heels off the ground. She lifts her toes. Gray flips out her wings and takes a step. Everlyn smiles and rolls with her. She always had a good seat. Then the dragon flaps, lifts, and topples the poth. She lands hard on her back, and Gray licks her face.

They have a long way to go.

When Jeryon returns to the cabin,
the poth is steeping and Gray is sitting on the roof. He can't decide if he loves her tea because of the steeping or in spite of it. It's a whole operation, putting leaves in hot water and staring at them, as complex as refitting a galley. First the water has to be boiling, not a bit below or it's ruined. Then you have to pour the water in slowly. Too fast, and it's ruined. Then you have to wait a precise number of seconds. Too few or too many, ruined. Pouring the tea out is a whole other operation. That precision appeals to him tremendously. It's not the type of attitude he'd have expected of her. Trouble is, he wants the tea now.

He whistles twice and Gray glides down to sit beside the crate. He grabs a crab between its back legs, extends his arm twice slowly, her eyes following the crab, then he flings it, spinning, high in the air. He whistles three times.

The wyrm leaps into the air after it. The crab tips off her snout and falls to the ground. Before it can get away, Gray picks it up with her mouth. And before she can chomp it, Jeryon whistles twice. She brings it to him for another throw. The crab is completely uninterested in flight. The next time, Gray relieves it of all interests.

He doesn't know what it is about her, but the poth makes him puckish sometimes. It's probably the tea.

Everlyn hears the wyrm whoosh and
bang into the cabin. After a particularly solid strike, she leaves her tea, but not her count of how long it's been steeping, to find out what they're doing.

Jeryon makes the catches increasingly difficult
by tossing the crabs near branches and close to the cabin. After one throw he watches the poth through a window. Her lips count off every tenth second. She gathers her hair and twists it behind her neck.
I'll make her a comb
, he thinks. Three tines. He'll inlay each with a piece of polished shell.

Gray sits beside him. He throws a crab near the cabin. Her angle to it causes her to clip a corner column. She squeals and flexes her wing. While she retrieves the missed crab, the poth appears in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“Crab Skeet. Watch this.”

He flings the crab toward the porch rail, and maybe because he's trying to impress her he gets his whole arm into it. The crab flies high and long. Gray gets a good jump, but has to slow to avoid hitting the rail. The wyrm doesn't want to miss in front of the poth, so she rears her head to snap it forward to make up the last bit of distance. She
drops her jaw to give her the best chance of catching the crab. And as the crab falls nearly into the poth's hands the wyrm reaches out with her very breath to snatch it, blasting the crab, the poth, and the cabin with a long gout of flame.

The cabin goes up like a brushfire. Culms explode from the steam trapped inside, spraying the porch with shrapnel. The poth screams, falls inside through a wall of smoke, and disappears.

Jeryon rushes to the cabin, but the heat drives him back, air feeding the fire from all sides, turning the cabin into a chimney. His eyebrows singe and the ends of his hair evaporate. Air is sucked from his lungs. He shouts for the poth, but can't hear himself, all sound blown from his ears.

Gray darts for the doorway, which is filled with flame. Jeryon grabs her tail to keep her from destroying herself. Gray can breathe fire. That doesn't mean she can withstand it. Gray snaps her tail, flinging off Jeryon's hand, and slithers inside.

Jeryon runs behind the cabin. The poth is at his window. It's too thin and high for her to crawl out, so she's chopping at the sill with his axe, the same idea he had. Her smock smokes where she's beaten fire off it. Her skin is blistering. Her hair is full of wisps. Her eyes are crazed. Smoke pours out of the window, and she starts coughing too hard to swing the axe.

“Give it to me,” he yells. She tumbles it out the window. He hacks at the bottom of the wall. When he strikes horizontally, the bamboo splinters instead of slicing neatly. When he strikes vertically, the axe breaks through the supports, but leaves the slats in place. He has to stop when he sees her fingers pulling at the slats from the other side, her mouth wide open, wanting air, while wind drafts under the deck to pour up through the floor.

“Jeryon,” she cries, “I can't get out!”

“I will get you out,” he says. He's crying too, but doesn't realize it.

He hears Gray inside. He hits the bottom of the wall with the axe and whistles three times. The wyrm attacks it savagely. An opening appears. Jeryon pulls the slats out, but they're woven so tightly he can
only remove one at a time. He gashes his hand on the bamboo splinters, and his blood soothes his own burns. The roof has caught. It's about to collapse. The fire is in the columns too, and the whole cabin lists toward him.

The poth sticks her foot through the hole, but that's all she can get out. He says, “Your arms! Maybe I can pull you out!” She sticks one hand through and her head. They're face-to-face. He pulls. She pushes at the floor of the cabin with her feet. They wedge her shoulder through.

Gray chews at the slats trapping her other shoulder. That's all they need, but they have so far to go. The bamboo frays. It will not break. Gray retreats. Jeryon whistles three times, but she doesn't return. The cabin lists farther.

“Go,” the poth says, terribly calm. She folds her body tightly against the wall.

He keeps pulling. The cabin rocks toward him. A corner of the porch collapses sending a wave of fire around his legs.

“Go,” she says and releases her grip.

He grabs her hand again. Their blood seems to boil between them. She pulls his hand to her scorched cheek. He combs her hair away from her face with his other hand. Bristled clumps fall out and float away. A hunk of flaming roof thatch flops beside him and shatters. The underbrush around the cabin threatens to catch.

He rubs a tear into her cheek. “Everlyn,” he says.

“So you do know my name,” she says.

3

Jeryon has hiked to the Crown to watch the sunrise. The spikes look like cenotaphs. Their shadows stab the west. The eastern sky is clear and pale blue where the night before it had been cranberry. A good day to sail.

The wind topples a log on the remains of a large fire near the edge, and a wave of old ash blows over him. Maybe he should have set up a signal fire, he thinks, however difficult it would have been to maintain. Maybe a ship would have come.

The sun crowns the horizon. Jeryon heads for camp.

In the hollow, the dragon is a grove of rib bones too big for him to carry off. He could render them, but there's a lucrative market for long bones provided they're unspoiled. At some point he'll sell them. The skull will be the greatest prize, despite his having removed the teeth to make tools. Mounted with its jaws open, it would make the perfect doorway for a shipowner's home.

The frogs at the pond have recovered. They make for good eating, but tough gigging. They're more shy than they once were.

At the shega meadow he gathers the last of the fruit from the tree and puts them in a dragonskin bag slung over his shoulder. He walks to the cliff's edge. The dragonprint has vanished, worn away or swallowed by the meadow. The sea remains, endlessly wearing.

Jeryon follows the stream to the beach and his salting operation. He puts seawater onto dragon skin stretched loosely in a frame, then uses a bamboo scraper to collect the salt after the water evaporates. He stores it in bamboo tubes for use in salting fish. The frames are empty now, as are the drying racks and salting crates lined with wing membrane. He hauls them into the trees. The salt tubes are already at camp.

The new cabin faces where the last one stood, a mirror image except it's elevated only half as high and the windows are even larger than those of the first cabin. Where the last one stood, asphodel grows.

He sits on the porch. He won't miss this cabin.

He hears a rustling under the porch. Jeryon swings his feet. More rustling. He swings his feet higher and counts. One. Two. On the third upswing, he feints bringing his legs down and a long, wide snout snaps at where his much-repaired sandal would have been. He puts his foot
on Gray's head between her new horns. She can't shake it off. Her tongue whips over her nose and licks him between the toes. That does it. He jerks his foot away and she pushes out.

Her breath whips over him too. It smells like charcoal. She's good about her fire now. She won't use it around the camp and rarely uses it when he hasn't commanded her to.

When she does it's usually to torch white crabs. The gelatinous phlogiston, which bursts into flame on contact with air, sticks to their shells, and she likes to watch them run around in a panic. Jeryon douses them before they set fire to the forest, although that, he's come to understand, is one of her fire's purposes: to light the brush and drive game into the open. Doing so once resulted in her discovering a hive of blue crabs, which normally hide when they don't have a dragon to strip.

Disappointingly, her fire also imparts a bad taste to food, like rancid oil, when used to light a cooking fire. So Jeryon trained her to use it on command by having her light a branch he could then use to light his fires. He wishes he could put the raw gel on the ends of small sticks, then coat the gel with a substance that could be rubbed off to set the stock on fire. The Trust would make gobs of money, and he would become the hero of housemaids and sculleries everywhere.

Jeryon had thought that Gray getting her fire signaled the onset of adolescence and a new growth spurt, one that would make her large enough to ride soon, but it hadn't. Perhaps she was traumatized by the fire. She wasn't burned badly. Her skin is indeed largely fireproof. When she charged through the cabin wall just before the roof collapsed, she was more injured by the jagged ends of bamboo.

He spent a week trying to wrap her wounds in healing leaves the way the poth had done for him, but she chewed them off. She was surlier than anything for a month, snapping at him and refusing to obey. Fortunately, the wounds healed well, the scars vanished as her top color hardened, along with her scales, to a slate gray, and six months later she began the growth spurt that's still ongoing.

As her neck emerges, she scrapes it against the bottom of the porch to remove some pale flakes of dead skin left over from her most recent shed. He lined the underside with long wedges of bamboo to help her and, more importantly, to reinforce the porch. They're no use, though, when she has to scratch in the middle of the night and uses the columns, shaking the whole cabin. He's worried she could bring it down, and he's becoming worried she'll grow so much one night she won't be able to get out in the morning.

Next come her shoulders, the forearms of her wings, and her elbows with their hand-long bone spikes. She uses them to hold things, pin crabs, stab beetles, and, most often, scratch her back. When he was breaking her to the saddle, she destroyed the first, a wicker number, with her spikes. And when he was breaking her to his weight by lying across her back, she nearly stabbed him several times. In one respect she's trained him. When she twitches an elbow spike he scratches her back with a small rake. He put a strap to hold the rake on saddle number seven, which has a wooden frame covered in dragonhide.

Now, her torso. Gray flattens like a cat and proceeds with little jerks. The cabin creaks alarmingly as the edge of the porch catches and releases her dorsal spikes like a clock's movement. She finally pops free and reinflates. She's seven feet at the shoulders, a foot taller than the tallest draft horse Jeryon's ever seen, with a body like an aurochs, nineteen feet from snout to tail, with a thirty-five-foot wingspan. She weighs a ton, he estimates.