The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(33)

“The box won’t be so bad with you, though,” she says.

Jeryon returns with a twenty-foot-long culm of green bamboo, then he drags in a ten-foot piece that’s older, browner, and thicker.

“What should we call it?” she says. “We can’t keep calling it ‘it.’ ”

“Why?” He cuts off the brown culm’s branches and reduces it to five two-foot logs.

“This could be a legendary dragon,” she says. “The first trained. The first ridden. It needs a legendary name.” She holds the dragon in front of her face. “Sea Blight. Cloudbreaker. The Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities.” The wyrmling shakes its head. “No, you’re right. You’re a good dragon. Another first.”

“We better hope so.” With one log Jeryon mallets the others into the ground to serve as corner posts.

“Why not Hope?”

“Why not Desperation?” He surveys his work. “It needs a practical name. Something easy to say.” He gives a post a whack, and a splinter flies off. The wyrmling leaps out of the poth’s grasp to pounce on it. “Like that.”

“Splinter?”

“No, Gray, like those spots appearing on its spine.”

“Actually,” the poth says, “that’s not terrible.” Jeryon shrugs his shoulders. He whacks another post, trying to get them even, and a larger splinter flies off.

She looks at it and says, “Huh. Let me check something.”

Everlyn picks up the splinter, then the wyrmling, which she lays on its back across her hand. It spreads its arms so its wings flop over her fingers and wrist like two washcloths. Its head and legs loll as if broken. It’s asleep. She prods the base of its tail with the splinter.

“What are you doing?” He comes over to watch.

“Sexing it,” she says. “My sister kept emperor snakes. She showed me how. It’s sort of a snake, isn’t it?” She probes some more. “I think our wyrmling’s female.”

“Gray works either way,” he says.

She flips the wyrmling back over and sets her on her palm. The wyrmling wakes up, and Everlyn says, “Gray.” The wyrmling shakes her wings, revealing a few faint gray streaks in the white.

“That settles it then.” Jeryon smiles slightly, but enough for her to see.

“Wait, you did mean Splinter, didn’t you?”

Jeryon says nothing and goes to the green culm. The poth laughs. And Jeryon thinks their prospects are about as good as the wyrmling’s color. They might escape. They might not.

2



* * *



They spend the rest of the afternoon finishing the pen. After splitting the green culm into slats, they use some as uprights between the corners and weave the rest through them and into slits in the posts. They reinforce the connections with bamboo threads. For hours they speak only with their work, which pleases them both.

The waste bamboo they use to light a fire for dinner and, to the wyrmling’s delight, to warm some rocks for her pen. Energized by sitting on one, she runs along the walls so fervently they threaten to topple. Seeing this, Jeryon starts weaving slats for a lid.

“Where did you learn to do that?” the poth says. “Make pens and all?”

“You pick things up,” Jeryon says. “How much did she eat?”

“Two whole whites,” she says. “As much as me. I don’t know where it went, especially after all she ate earlier.”

The wyrmling stops, looks up at them, and takes an enormous dump. It has to waddle forward to let it all out, as if the dump were having her. The gentle breezes by the pond suddenly become a liability, too weak to carry off such a heavy stench.

“I’ll get some leaves to pick it up,” she says.

“I can make a trowel,” he says.

“No, that’s all right.” Her altruism is undermined by how quickly she runs from the pen and how slowly she returns.

While waiting, Jeryon parses the smell. Lye, with a hint of old stable and older man.

After the poth disposes of the scat downwind west of the pond, they watch the wyrmling mount a rock and wrap her wings around it. Her head flops to the side and slowly rolls over, twisting her neck nearly all the way around.

“Is that normal?” Jeryon says.

“She may be part cat,” the poth says.

The wyrmling falls asleep. Everlyn strokes between her wings. The wyrmling’s mouth flops open. The poth plucks a firefly out of the air and feeds it to her.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “She has to ask.”

“It’s just a little bedtime snack.” The wyrmling chews herself back to sleep, the firefly’s glowing posterior sticking out of her mouth.

“She doesn’t get to snack,” he says. “You can’t just let her have every beetle that falls into your pocket.”

“That was an accident,” she says.

“She has to do something for it,” he says. “She has to learn that we control her food. Otherwise, she’ll never obey, and we’ll never get off this island.”

“What, by riding her?” she says. “I was just kidding earlier. It’ll take years for her to be big enough to ride, if she even could be. We’ll be found long before then.”