The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(44)

“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.