“So it's my turn to be hunted,” Edith said grimly.
She stood with her arms crossed under her chest, staring into the small fire in the hearth. When she and my Cassia had returned home, I had done my best to alert them to the danger. My gaps in knowledge of human vocabulary were proving increasingly frustrating. It was only when I told Edith that ‘Sir Kenneth’ was a knight, that she seemed to grasp what had occurred.
The small log she had burning in the fireplace did not give off any smoke. It smelled strongly of herbs and other unknown substances. Raban’s words made more sense now. Humans almost always had a fire burning when they were at home. A smokeless fire would make it much easier to hide, with no smoke curling up into the sky to signal your location.
“We’re not just going to let these men take you over some rumors!” my Cassia cut in. She was still dressed in winter garb borrowed from Edith. At her words, Edith looked at her and shook her head.
“This isn’t ye quarrel lass,” she replied sternly. “It’s me they’ll be looking for. If I stay ‘ere, they’ll ‘ave no cause to pay ye mind.”
Cassia started to argue with her, but it was my turn to cut in. I’d rarely if ever growled at my Cassia since I was a small hatchling. My body was now far larger, so it rumbled through the room as I stepped between the two women. Both seemed shocked at my behavior.
Before they could start lecturing me, I turned towards Edith and reared up on my hind legs. My body had grown significantly from the days that a bunny rabbit matched me in stature. When I balanced on my hind legs, I could look Edith right in the eye. My wings partially unfurled and flapped to help me with my balance.
I placed one of my clawed front feet on her torso where my gem had temporarily sat. She was going to pull away, but when she looked me in the eye she stopped. Communicating what I wanted to with words wasn’t possible for me right now. My adolescent jaw structure and lacking vocabulary just didn’t allow for the depth of feeling which welled up inside of me.
“... What the hells, Sanguine! Stop that!” Cassia commanded me. She stepped forward and tried to grab me by one of the nubby horns that grew behind the crest above my eyes. When her fingers touched me, a jolt went through her body. Her words died in her throat.
For just a moment, she might have grasped onto what I was feeling.
Edith slowly raised one of her hands and held onto my clawed digits. Her lips were pursed and a complex expression played out through her face. Anger at my aggressive course of action was obvious from how her brows pushed together. There was also fear, hiding in the dark corners behind her eyes. It didn’t seem to be directed at me, however.
The most difficult part to understand was why her cheeks twitched, halfway there to form a smile. As I looked into her eyes, I was absolutely certain that I’d never understand the complexities lying behind her gaze. Humans really were such strange creatures.
I didn’t get why she wanted to hide that she was happy about what I’d done.
The moment passed. I pulled back from Edith and dropped back down to all fours. Cassia let go of my horn. She started to follow me as I went to go sit in a corner, before she instead rounded on Edith.
“What was that?!” she choked out. “I don’t- What- What’s gotten into him?”
It bothered me, hearing how anxious she was. Right now I didn’t want another lecture, or to talk about it. Edith probably would have been right to get angry with me. That little hint of happiness had given me many more troublesome things to think over.
“He’s growing up, Cassia dear,” Edith said after taking a deep breath. “Don’t fuss at him about it for now. I’ll handle it, when it’s time.”
“How are you going to ‘handle’ it if you let witch-hunters get you?” Cassia said with her hands on her hips. Edith crossed over to her and held out her own hand. My Cassia stared at it for a moment before she took Edith’s offered palm, grumbling all the while. Edith delicately rubbed her thumb over the back of Cassia's knuckles.
“I changed my mind, lass,” Edith told her calmly. “Yes, I know. Ye were all raring for another fight. But I’ll have to decline it tonight. Ye are right.” Cassia seemed put out by this heel face turn.
“So you’re coming with us?” she murmured.
“Aye lass, I’m coming with ye. I was fixing to act a fool again. Breaking a promise to ye two, just because some brigands come sniffing around my house, ain’t right.”
“Just what did Sanguine… Did him staring you down…?” Cassia left those words uncompleted in the air. “I felt… something. For just a moment.” Edith nodded in return.
“Aye. That’ll be one of those things I’ll handle,” Edith said with a reassuring smile. “Don’t ye worry about it none. I’ll explain it to ye, once I’m sure I know what happened. I know ye will have many questions, but alas, they’ll need to wait a wee bit.”
Edith let go of Cassia’s hand and smoothed out the front of her dress.
“We will need to move quick,” she continued. “Can I trust ye to pack up and get Magnus in the cart while I fetch the horse?”
“I- yes- but what if you’re seen?” Cassia said with worry.
“Oh I’ve got a few tricks down my apron pockets lass, don’t ye fuss none,” Edith replied with a grin. “Its not my first time dealing with witch-hunters. I’m feeling quite spry these days as well. I’ll be back in just a tick or two.”
“As for ye, beasty,” Edith called over her shoulder. “Help yer lass with the packing, such as ye can. There’ll be time for me to have Words with ye later.”
I didn’t like the sound of ‘having Words’. It sounded like a more dangerous form of a ‘young lady’ lecture. With a huff, I rose to all fours and padded over to help.
Edith left her house and headed back towards the village, her pointy hat tilted so that the chill wind broke across it. My Cassia looked at me strangely. My head tilted up towards her, waiting to see if she was going to say something. After a moment she shook her head.
“Can you get the bags and pull them up into the cart?” She asked with a worryingly neutral tone. “A ‘big and strong’ dragon like you should be able to handle it.” Yeah, she was definitely still annoyed with me for posturing towards Edith. Hopefully she’d forgive me for it once we got on the road.
The bags in question contained the food that Edith and my Cassia had bartered for in town. Many things which couldn’t come with us had been traded to other humans who wanted them for items they had a surplus of. I had heard the two women mention ‘coins’ could be involved in such trades, but neither had many to use.
Small villages like this rarely had enough coins to bother, apparently. I doubted I would have understood the point even if they’d had coins to show me. Understanding why any human would give up something of theirs voluntarily was difficult enough to begin with.
Picking up the bags proved to be fairly easy. Not tearing the rough woven fabric of each sack with my sharp teeth was more troublesome. The scents coming out of the sacks suggested they largely contained human food. In a couple of cases, they smelled like meat but tinged with minerals from the sea. My mouth began to water, but I fought down the urge to have a nibble or two.
Each sack went into an open place in the back of the cart. I heard Cassia speaking to the child, Magnus. How the child would fare on the open road was questionable. While I wasn’t sure, Edith believed the Thaw was mere days away. Even so, Mangus’s condition was apparently still ‘delicate’. Edith had been hesitant to tell me much more than that.
I didn’t think she was hiding something from me. It felt like one of those ‘complicated’ human things. Either way, we were out of time. Magnus would learn that a dragon had been living in the same house as him for just under two weeks. I would finally get to see what had Edith so worried.
The back door of the house opened. My Cassia came out, helping the child walk. Magnus was so heavily bundled up in winter clothing that he resembled an orb. Nearly every spare bit of warm attire Edith owned was piled onto him. It was possible that Magnus was still weak, but I wondered if all that clothing was why my Cassia needed to let him lean on her.
Frustratingly, I couldn’t see much of the boy’s features. Likewise, he didn’t seem aware of my presence. He could barely see where he was going, in fact, and relied on my Cassia to direct him. A small tingle of jealousy that he was getting to hold onto her instead of me curled up into my mind. For some reason it quickly fizzled out. Perhaps it was because he was a hatchling. That, or it was because seeing him fumble around was hard to watch.
Cassia needed my help to push the child into the carriage from below while she pulled him from above. He wasn’t heavy; his attire just made getting a hold on him difficult. Once he was in the cart, my Cassia got him tucked into a corner in a nest of blankets. I wondered if there would be any left for her or Edith to sleep under.
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Around the time we got Magnus situated in the back of the cart, I started to hear heavy crunches of snow approaching us. A few moments later, a large creature I’d never seen before rounded the end of the house. It was like a deer, but had no antlers on its head. A long trail of hair ran from its head down the side of its neck.
I was a little shocked. This creature was far larger than me. Its legs were slender, but the core of its body was a stocky boulder of muscle. When the rest of it came into view, I could see another long plume of hair stuck off of its hindquarters. Edith was riding on its back.
Edith was seated on what looked like a thick roughly woven blanket astride the creature’s back. A length of leather was held in her hands, either end tied to a piece of wood between the creature's teeth. The entire sight was exceedingly odd to me. Why would any living creature allow another to treat it thusly?
Carrying my Cassia in my claws was different. This was a kind of subjugation that I could not imagine tolerating while I drew breath.
Edith tugged on the leather in her hands, which made the creature stop beside the wagon. With surprising dexterity, given her winter attire, she dropped down to the ground beside it. Her hand did not let go of the creature’s lead. It remained standing there when it could have bolted for freedom.
I found that disturbing, more so than most human strangeness.
“Have ye- ah! Ye have,” Edith said as she looked over the wagon and spotted Magnus lodged in the back. “... I suppose that’s it then. I’ll get Bronston here hitched up, pop inside for one last thing, then we’ll be off. Help me out, would ye Cassia dear?”
I watched with some disgust as the ladies led the creature to stand in front of the wagon. Apparently this was the ‘horse’ Edith had spoken. Its name was Bronston. Why they would name a creature that they humiliated in this fashion baffled me. Bronston seemed familiar with what they were doing, so this was hardly the first time. He showed little sign of distress, other than to stamp one of his hooves into the snow on occasion.
Straps and bits of metal that I hadn’t known the purpose of hung from the front of the wagon. With Cassia and Edith both working, the straps were secured around Bronston’s body. His purpose made more sense now. He was to be a creature of burden, forced to pull the cart and everything inside of it. I pitied the beast. No living being should be treated this way.
My dislike for how Bronston was treated did not extend so far that I would put a stop to it. For now. The cart was simply too heavy for the ladies to pull it themselves. There was absolutely no way I was going to volunteer to take its place. We needed the horse to do this duty for now. In the future, perhaps I would be large enough to carry anything we needed in my claws.
Once Bronston was strapped in, my Cassia climbed up onto a seat at the front of the cart. I climbed up after her, dropping down next to Magnus in the back. There was just enough room that I could curl up between him and the sacks of food. Edith tramped back inside. She did not come back for several minutes.
Just as I thought we should go look for her, she came back outside. Something was tucked under her cloak, but whatever it was didn’t seem terribly important. It was time to leave. My Cassia leaned over the side of the cart, offering her hand to help pull Edith up. Edith took the offered palm gladly and hauled herself into the wagon’s front seat alongside her.
Without any further aplomb, Edith took up Bronston’s lead and gave it a small flick of her wrists. The horse started walking forward on que. A creak came from the cart’s wheels as it was pulled along with a jolt.
The sun had set a little while ago. Faded remnants of its light still clung to the horizon. Overhead, the night sky was just starting to open up from a thin cloud cover. A full array of stars was laid out above us, with a half moon’s light to guide our way.
It was quiet, peaceful. Bronston’s straps occasionally gave a jangle as he found his stride. The horse himself gave low panting breaths as he pulled against the load. His hooves and the cart’s wheels crunched through the snow. Other than that, only the creak of the cart could be heard from time to time.
Even during the cool night, I could feel the wind changing. Soon the icy blows from Wintertide would grow still. Warmer winds from Summershore would take time to make their way up to the village of Greenreimse. As we headed towards Summershore, we were likely to meet the change of the winds’ guard. The Thaw was almost upon us, at long last.
I looked forward to seeing a world where snow and ice did not dominate the landscape.
No one seemed to notice us leaving the village. Any human still awake would be huddling around their hearths. Edith’s house was on the outskirts of the village to begin with. We needed to cut around the outside edge to reach the main road leading towards Summershore. There were enough small paths between the various farm fields and paddocks that finding our way wasn’t difficult in the moonlight.
Every once in a while I saw the shapes of livestock huddled in one of the humans’ fields. They were mostly asleep, huddled together for warmth under whatever shelter had been provided for them. The scents of fresh blood and vitality were tempting, but it would only bring us trouble we didn’t need for me to hunt on our way out of town.
Owning another creature like an unliving object was another human notion I found especially strange. When you hunted, it was a contest between you and your prey to see whether the prey would be a meal or live another day. A predator that failed in its hunt would starve as a consequence.
Humans, on the other hand, had found ways to cheat at the contest. A great many prey animals had been corralled by humans in fenced enclosures. They spent their whole lives there, unless a human decided to move them to another location. While perhaps a livestock animal could injure or even kill a human, that was only when the human acted foolishly or by an accident.
The entire arrangement struck me as unfair. Honorless. The livestock gained nothing that they would not already have by living as creatures did naturally. Perhaps there was some protection as a human guarded its animals from predators, but then again the human was a predator itself.
I did not think that dragons would ever stoop so low. It went against an innate pride that I felt, that I suspected came from my lineage.
Soon enough, we left the entire village behind us. Its snow covered roofs and the low lights from its covered windows faded into the distance. The terrain between Greenreimse and the Redstone Hills was largely flat, but it was broken up by small stands of trees, the occasional hill, and subtle variances in the ground level.
Once Edith had determined we were far enough away, she asked my Cassia to pull out and light a lantern. It had small shutters like one would have over a window on it. By these and a small door built into one side, it could cast light down on the wagon but hide it from sight from far away. On a moonlit night, an uncovered lantern would stand out for miles.
It took my Cassia a couple of attempts to light the lantern. A small metal box that we’d brought with us contained a bit of the treated smokeless wood. It could smolder for many hours after the main fire was doused. My Cassia took a small cord called a ‘wick’ and gingerly set it to flame after opening the box. She took great care, but the wind snuffed out the meager wick’s flame twice before she succeeded in using it to light the lantern.
“Shame we can’t use Sanguine for this kind of thing,” my Cassia said quietly, as if afraid someone was listening. She carefully stowed the smolder box away. “But I don’t dare ask him, lest he cause a great ‘bang’ like the last time he made flame.”
I grumbled from the back of the carriage. It wasn’t my fault that I’d not had a chance to practice making dragonfire. The chance that it could have blown up Edith’s house or the surrounding countryside was certainly there. Using my fire for petty tasks was also beneath me. Well, unless my Cassia asked nicely.
My Cassia reached behind her and hooked the lantern onto an iron pole that was mounted to one side of the cart. The lantern squeaked as the cart moved. Its low light was probably comforting for the humans. To me, night time was actually more comfortable to look at than the day, at least during Winter. The moon’s light didn’t glare off of the snow in as harsh a fashion as the Sun.
Cassia’s hand reached back into the wagon and patted me on my head. Still grumbling, I nuzzled against it. Her digits were covered in a heavy mitten, but I could still feel her rubbing my scales. Now that we were finally on our way, perhaps things could relax a bit.
My grumble settled into a happier rumble. As Cassia continued to rub at the crests on top of my head, I turned to look over at Magnus buried in his blanket nest. He was staring at me, his head poking out of the fabric.
Disconcertingly, his eyes glowed like amber in the low light.
“So who is your friend Edith?” Cassia asked as she hopped down from the cart’s front seat. “The one Magnus will be staying with.”
“Hmm? Ah, ye mean T’laanga,” Edith replied. She took her time carefully stepping down to the ground due to the cumbersome nature of her winter garb. As she spoke, she moved to tie Bronston’s lead to a tree. “He’s… a bit eccentric, but he’s a good man. A bit like you in some ways.”
“What do you mean?” Cassia prodded as she moved around the side of the cart to help Magnus down.
“Meaning he likes his own company,” Edith replied. “T’laanga… We met when I was a young lass, way down Summershore from here. He was a drover; helped me out when I was in a spot of trouble.”
Cassia lifted Magnus down onto the ground, helping him totter over to a stump where he could sit while we set up camp. We’d been on the road since the previous night with only a few short breaks to stretch our legs.
Going any further risked exhausting Bronston as well. Steam rose off of him in great clouds in the chill air. Edith started to wipe the horse down so that the sweat wouldn’t freeze to his body as she continued talking.
“T’laanga and I traveled together on and off for a few years. He taught me some things about how to take care of m’self. I taught him a thing or two about herbs.”
“Hmm? Just a friend then?” Cassia said with one of those ‘complex’ human expressions on her face. Edith turned to look at her, squinting.
“Aye lass, just a friend,” she replied tersely. “Like I said… T’laanga prefers his own company.”
“But he won’t mind taking care of Magnus?” Cassia pressed on.
“Oh he’ll complain a bit, but T’laanga’s got a soft spot for troubled kids,” Edith said with a small sigh. “He might act like he’s got a pole tied to his back, but he’ll come round. Not to mention, he might have some experience handling… some more complex issues.”
“You mean like irritable dragons?” Cassia joked. With Magnus situated, she was focused on trying to get a small fire pit dug out. Even a small fire would help hold back the chill if tended properly. I’d been circling around the campsite, sniffing at the air for prey. Cassia’s jest drew my attention back towards her.
“Mmm, ye may be more right than ye think lass,” Edith responded. “T’laanga has travelled further than most ever will. If anyone’s seen a dragon before, it may well be him.”
Now that was a very interesting piece of information. I wondered what kind of person this ‘T’laanga’ could be. As Cassia and Edith spoke, the former became distracted from setting the fire. My gaze was drawn over to Magnus by a strange feeling in my gut. Magnus was staring at the collection of sticks Cassia had formed into a crude pyramid.
A snap of a branch in the forest distracted me. Looking over, I spotted a squirrel collecting itself from where it had fallen out of a tree. That would make a good snack before I properly went hunting.
“Ah, thanks for setting the fire lass,” Edith said as I went bounding off into the woods. “My bones may feel fresher than they have in years, but the cold’s still a hated foe for me.”
Cassia glanced down at the merrily burning pile of sticks. She still hadn’t pulled out the tinderbox.
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