The Dragon’s Appraiser: Part Two (3 page)

“
W
e usually make
the soup with Vrynesh beef, but I’m afraid the city is running low on imported meats.”

Sevrrn stared down at the bowl of
soup
. That was a new word and he wasn’t sure if he liked it yet. The odd concoction smelled appealing enough, but there were numerous pieces of vegetation floating in the liquid.

Dragons did not eat plants.

There were pieces of chicken floating in the liquid and he decided to give them a try. As he moved to grab a fat chunk, Madja intercepted his hand, a small smile playing on her lips. She placed a metal spoon in his hand and then inclined her head toward the innkeeper and his daughter. They had already begun eating and Sevrrn could see that they were using the spoons to extract the chicken and plants from the liquid.

The whole process of using a spoon seemed impractical to Sevrrn, but he humored Madja. For the first time since returning to the inn, she seemed to be in good spirits.

“I noticed that the docks were unusually desolate,” Madja said to the humans. “Have the trade values gone down here?”

The young woman shook her head. “The Allonans have paid mercenaries to attack any ships that are bound for the island. Not even the Kaletani will come anywhere near our ports.”

Using a spoon was not as easy as it appeared. It seemed as though every time there was a piece of meat within his reach, it would slip out and he would end up with a piece of vegetation instead. How annoying.

“Are the Allonans trying to stifle our trade?”

Madja was able to use the spoon without even looking down at her bowl. How could she do that so easily?

“That’s one theory,” the woman said. “But many of us believe they’re trying to provoke Sevrrn’s wrath.”

Sevrrn looked up at the mention of his name. Intrigued, he decided to address the woman directly.

“Explain.”

She looked confused and Madja quickly sought to elaborate. “What he means is, why would the Allonans want to provoke Sevrrn?”

“They don’t believe he truly resides in the mountain,” the woman said. “They think he’s just a tale we made up to scare away potential invaders.”

“Why would they think that?” Madja asked.

“No one living has ever seen him. We’ve only ever heard of him in legends.”

Interesting
.

His curiosity satisfied, Sevrrn returned his attention to the soup and his newest nemesis: the spoon.

“If he doesn’t come to the defense of the island, Allona will advance,” the woman said. “Rumor is, they have thirty warships prepared to descend on the capital.”

Madja placed her spoon in her now-empty bowl. Sevrrn looked down at his own bowl, which was still full. There was an uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. Even the plants were beginning to look appetizing.

“You shouldn’t worry,” Madja said to them. “I know Sevrrn will come to our aid.”

Her words perplexed him. Madja did not usually lie.

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

Madja gave him a pointed look. “Because Sevrrn is the patron god of Erda. He’s always protected us. Why would he stop now?”

“Perhaps to humans, Sevrrn is god,” he said, rather amused to be referring to himself in the third person. “I doubt he sees it that way. Did you ever consider that the only reason he defends the island is because it is where his hoard is located?”

Finally, Sevrrn managed to catch a piece of chicken. He held his spoon up to show Madja, but she didn’t seem impressed.

“That doesn’t sound very noble,” said Madja. “But that doesn’t really change anything. The Allonans could very well be coming to steal all of his treasure.”

“They can try,” he told her. “But perhaps when they see that Sevrrn does, in fact, exist, they will pay him proper tribute. Unlike the natives, who as of late have been rather lax in that regard.”

Sevrrn felt a tug at the corners of his lips. He was very much looking forward to seeing what treasures these Allonans would have to offer him. He’d heard that they were in possession of a mermaid with prismatic scales. He would enjoy having that in his lake.

“I would think Sevrrn would be rather eager to defend the island from the nation that killed his sister,” Madja said.

Now, she was just being plain ridiculous. The only thing that annoyed him was that they had killed Valdyra before he could.

The innkeeper, who had been quiet for some time, finally spoke his piece.

“Your companion is right,” he said to Madja. “Our island has flourished for thousands of years, while many great nations have fallen. We have only Sevrrn to thank for this. Yet we
have
been lax in our offerings to the dragon for some time. Word is, the capital has become so complacent in its tributes that they’ve gone so far as to offer up one of our own girls as a sacrifice and even that did not evoke Sevrrn’s mercy. Perhaps it is our own fault that our god has forsaken us.”

Finally, someone who was making some sense.

Abruptly, Madja stood. The sound of her chair scraping against the floor assaulted Sevrrn’s ears.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’m heading to bed now.”

M
adja stood on the balcony
, taking in the fresh air while she could. In a few days, she’d be back in Sevrrn’s lair. The prospect of being in a sea of gold had never been so dreary.

“You are angry.”

She wasn’t startled when Sevrrn appeared beside her. Over the past few weeks, she had developed a sort of sixth sense when it came to detecting his presence. It probably wasn’t as impressive as it sounded, because the air around him was always charged with an invisible energy.

“I’m not sure how I feel,” she said in all honesty. “Hey, have I ever told you how I ended up in your lair? Why they chose me over everyone else?”

“I never asked,” he said, perturbed by the realization.

“Remember I told you about the family in charge of your tributes, the Kavesh? They’ve had close ties to the royal family for five generations. They hold a lot of influence with the prince, but what a lot of people don’t know is that they’re broke. They have a lot of debt overseas and they used to owe my father a great deal of money. Conveniently, they benefited a lot from his death.

“A year ago, Jerl, the head of the family, wanted me to marry his son. His son wasn’t really a bad man, but I couldn’t possibly marry into that family after what they did to my father. Not to mention, they had their eyes on my mother’s fortune. You see, my father built his own wealth, but my mother was an heiress. Right now, my aunt controls the estate, but she’s really old. When she dies, it all goes to me. Or at least, it would have.”

“I see,” Sevrrn said. “So when you refused, they arranged for you to be sacrificed out of spite?”

“Maybe in part, but more likely it was because of my cousin. I have a younger cousin who’s third in line for the estate. I’d bet anything that Jerl’s son is already planning their wedding.”

“This Jerl sounds like a clever man,” Sevrrn remarked.

Madja didn’t bother arguing. She was beginning to understand that the dragon’s mind didn’t have much of a moral compass.

“To be honest, I wasn’t too scared about being sacrificed,” Madja said, her mind drifting back in time. “I mean, I cried some, but the more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that you weren’t real. I imagined that I would find a great big hoard of abandoned treasures. I’d take whatever I could carry, make for the nearest port, and stow away on a ship bound for a far-off continent. Maybe Manduria. Women have equal rights there. I could work as an appraiser and make my own fortune.”

A wistful grin claimed her lips. “I had this crazy fantasy about buying a huge trading vessel. I’d travel back to the island and I’d use my money and influence to undercut all of the Kavesh’s goods.”

Sevrrn did not appear impressed. “You have an odd notion of vengeance. I would simply kill them all.”

Madja couldn’t help but laugh. “You think I should kill the Kavesh?”

His expression perfectly blank, he said, “I could leave for the lair right now, get my scales and fly to the capital. They will all be dead before the night falls.”

To her eternal shame, Madja hesitated.

“No, that wouldn’t be right,” she said, trying to convince herself just as much as him. “Just like it wouldn’t be right to let the island fall to Allona. So many people could die, Sevrrn. You have the power to protect them all.”

“Just as I have the power to aid the Allonans. Then, they would be beholden to me and would pay me proper tribute.”

Madja glared at him. “You already have more treasures than you even know what to do with.”

“I know full well what to do with my treasures,” he replied with a snort.

She felt her shoulders sag. This wasn’t an argument she could win. Over the past few weeks, she had thought she’d seen a change in him. But although he had become better at acting human, it really was just a façade. Underneath the man’s skin, he was nothing more than a dragon.

Was he even capable of compassion?

Would he ever be capable of love?

Or had Madja only been seeing what she wanted to see?

M
adja was fairly
certain that Sevrrn had never felt vulnerable a day in his life. That was the only explanation she could come up with for why he slept like the dead.

Sevrrn could fall asleep on a whim. Literally. He had once explained that he had a near-mastery of all of his biological processes. Apparently, it was one of the prerequisites for being able to take human form, and why only the long-lived and powerful dragons could do so.

After an hour of tossing and turning in bed, Madja finally gave up. She made no effort to be quiet as she wrapped a dress robe around her bed shift, stepped into her slippers, and left the room. By now, she knew that even if the land quaked and split open beneath him, Sevrrn wasn’t climbing out of the hole until sunrise.

There were no lights on in the inn, but somehow Madja made it outside without stumbling. Out on the walkway, she stared up at the room where Sevrrn was still resting. As usual, he had wanted to have sex with her that night. Both her mood and the fact that her father had once slept in that very bed had made rejecting him easy.

She took a walk along the shore. The last time she had seen the cove at night, Madja had been five-years-old and the myriad ships had looked like shadowed giants, blotting out the horizon. She remembered how big they had seemed and how small they had made her feel. But now, as she looked over the empty cove and out into the vast expanse of ocean, she felt smaller and more insignificant than ever before.

There was nothing that belonged to her.
She
didn’t even belong to her. She was just another object in an ancient dragon’s sea of possessions. While she didn’t doubt that she fascinated him, she knew deep down that it was only a matter of time before that fascination subsided.

The year before her father died, Madja had fallen head over heels for the handsome son of a Mandurian trader. She had spied him standing at the bow of his father’s ship, bare-chested and gloriously tanned. He’d had long, lustrous black hair and the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen. After he disappeared below the deck, she had run home at full speed to tell her father that she’d seen the boy she wanted to marry. It was
love
at first sight.

Rather than laugh at how irrational his daughter was being, he had asked why it was she thought she was in love. She had told him how her palms had sweat and how her heart had pounded. She had told him how she had wanted to stand by his side more than she had ever wanted anything in her entire life. Much to her despair, her father had told her that what she was feeling wasn’t unique and it most certainly wasn’t love.

“Love is not a pounding heart or a burning desire,” he had told her. “Those are purely the forces that pull two people together and while they are powerful forces, they can often fade as abruptly as they appeared. Love is what is left once they’re gone. It’s the quiet comfort in knowing that there is someone in the world who values you above all other things.”

How long would it be, how many new and fascinating treasures would it take before Sevrrn lost interest in her? Would she be no different than one of the coins that made up his floor?

Her morbid thoughts remained wrapped around her like a black cloak as she stepped onto the pier. It was busier there. Barrel-chested laborers hauled crates up and down the wooden street, making half-hearted attempts to ignore the giggles and croons of low-level prostitutes.

There was a time when Madja would have been anxious about walking the docks alone at night. After three months of living with a dragon, her threshold for fear had drastically increased. Even so, she couldn’t help but be startled as something slammed into her from behind.

Madja staggered forward, hearing a loud
thunk
from behind her as she regained her balance. Turning around, she saw that it was a little girl. She had fallen, legs splayed awkwardly as she stared down at the blood pooling on a scraped knee. She looked up at Madja, her brown eyes wide.

“I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” Madja said, crouching down to the girl’s level. Bunching up the sleeve of her robe, she pressed it to the tiny knee. “Are you okay?”

They were distracted as another girl, this one slightly older, came dashing up. She skidded to a halt in front of them and narrowly avoided crashing into Madja herself.

“What happened?” the older one asked after catching her breath.

“I fell down,” the smaller one mumbled.

Madja realized that she recognized the girls. They were the two bored-looking children that had been sitting at the fish cake stall earlier that afternoon.

Standing up and brushing herself off, Madja asked, “What are you two doing down here at this hour? Where are your parents?”

They exchanged guilty looks.

“Our father is working late tonight, because of the festival,” the older one said.

“We got tired of sitting around,” added her sister.

“There’s a festival tonight?” Madja asked as she helped the little girl up.

“For the dragon.”

Madja stiffened. Had they found out that Sevrrn was in the town?

The older girl said, “They’re going to light fireworks over the cove. When Sevrrn sees them, he’ll know he has to come and keep us safe.”

Madja knew what they were referring to and relaxed. Years ago, when the Allonans had declared war on them, they had held a similar festival. Her father had told her that when he was a boy, it had been called The Firelight Festival and the islanders had held it every year to honor their god.

“Well this is no place for nice girls such as yourselves,” Madja told them. “How about I take you back to your father?”

She hadn’t planned on going back into town, but she wouldn’t have been able to sleep knowing that the girls were running around such a seedy area unattended.

As it turned out, the girls had also recognized Madja from earlier. As they made their way back to the marketplace, they plied her with questions about where she was from and why she was visiting Bern. The younger one, Ana, had been enchanted by Madja’s silk robes and had thought she was a princess. Her sister Cella had been more interested in Sevrrn, whom she shyly admitted was handsome.

Although most of the shops had closed, the marketplace was more crowded than ever. Fortunetellers with crystal balls offered prophecies next to apathetic youths that manned ring-toss games. Mobile food carts crowded the walkways selling steamed noodles, roasted meats, and sugared confections. The sounds of drums and crashing cymbals could be heard from a distant street.

Madja didn’t mind the chaos and even took the girls for a walk up and down a couple of the streets. Because she had thought to bring a few coins, she was able to buy a hairpiece for Cella and shaved ice for all three of them.

Their father looked to be closing up shop when they finally arrived. The street that housed his stall was much quieter than the others, with only a handful of people who all seemed to be passing through.

When he saw his daughters, the man was visibly relieved.

“There you are!” he exclaimed, his voice and odd mix of enthusiasm and sternness.

They both ran to their father. “Madja bought us dessert!”

Their father looked up, seeming to notice Madja for the first time. Even in the dim light, Madja could see a flush creep across his cheeks.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, removing his hat and giving a polite bow. “I hope they didn’t cause you any trouble.”

Although Madja had grown up in an upper-class family, she had rarely dressed the part of an heiress and wasn’t used to people treating her as such. To show that his deference was misplaced, she returned his bow.

“The pleasure was all mine. Your girls are wonderful.”

She couldn’t have been more sincere. Although her time with the children had been brief, they had done wonders for her mood. She felt more invigorated than when she had woken up the morning prior.

The man smiled, transforming his plain face into something endearing. It had been a long time since anyone had regarded her with such genuine warmth and she found herself smiling back at him.

“I hope they didn’t keep you from your husband.” While he spoke, he tried to busy himself with cleaning the table of his stall, but Madja noticed he was only pushing the rag in small circles.

“Oh, I’m not married,” she told him.

“The man you were with today?”

“He’s my brother,” she said, completely forgetting their cover story.

Scratching his temple, he said, “I can’t say that I see the resemblance.”

“He was my late husband’s brother,” she said, trying to salvage the lie. It was a realistic answer. Widows were not bound by the same social conventions as maidens, and therefore it was not unheard of for them to travel without a chaperone.

“My condolences,” he said, tilting his chin down. “I lost my wife two years ago.”

Madja’s face burned with shame. While she had endured the loss of both her parents, it felt wrong to accept his empathy for something so intimate.

“Well, I suppose I should be going,” she told him. “I wouldn’t want to take any more of your time.”

Ana looked up at her through big, round eyes. “Don’t you want to see the fireworks with us?”

“Please,” their father said. “If you don’t mind waiting for me to finish up here, it would be my honor to show you the best view in town.”