Sonata Form

by Carole Cummings

  “There isn’t. He’s not. Only, he’s a bit awkward, and a little too....” Milo trailed off, unable to find the right word for what Cennydd was. Odd, certainly, and angry about it, but—

  “Exactly.” Glynn shoved the cloth at Milo’s chest. “Talk all you like. Only, don’t show him your back.” She turned for the hallway that led to the kitchen. “Rhywun Ceri ran you a bath. You’ll have just enough time before supper.”

  Milo watched her go, not really any more informed than he’d been a minute ago. But the smells from the kitchen were stronger now and doing alarming things to his empty stomach, and the siren song of a hot bath was just as convincing to him now as to a sailor called to rocky ruin.

  And anyway, Glynn really could handle herself just fine. Cynnedd and his cricket bat had more reason to worry than she did.

  “…AND RHYWUN Collins says she’s some books that might help, and she’ll let me borrow them if I want.” Glynn’s eager smile implied she very much wanted. “I mean, I love working at the forge with Tad,” she hastened to put in at Howell’s sigh. She sent a pleading look at Milo. “But Rhywun Collins says I’m a natural with the livestock already.” Rhywun Collins was the local veterinarian, and her word was not a thing to be dismissed. “And it can’t be that different to set a broken leg for a dragon, can it?”

  “Ehm. Well. Yes? It sort of can.” Milo set his beer aside. “Some of them have legs as big as tree trunks. There are winches involved. And sometimes a lot of magic. That’s if they even let you—”

  “But not always! And I’d study so hard, you’d never—”

  “Glynn, it’s not that easy.” Milo tried to be gentle, but it would hurt less in the long run if he was as plain as possible. He hadn’t known Glynn had been tagging after Rhywun Collins, and he certainly hadn’t known Glynn had set her sights on the profession herself, but—“Rhywun Collins is the best there is when it comes to animals, and she was a huge help when Lleu ate that rope and almost killed himself with his own stupidity.” Milo ignored his mam’s indignant noise. “But she’s never got within two furlongs of a dragon. Dragons aren’t like other animals. And you’re not dragonkin.”

  “Well, I know that.” Glynn rolled her eyes and toyed with the fish on her plate. Fried brown trout, her favorite, with potato cakes and a cabbage and bacon casserole on the side, because it was her birthday and Ceri adored her like a daughter. From the way Glynn had been pleading her case and ignoring her supper, it was effort wasted. “But Tad’s knees are getting bad, and he’s getting on—sorry, Tad. I mean, not that you’re old.” She looked suitably contrite for the seemingly unintended slur, but it didn’t stop her from pointing another piteous look at Milo. “It’s true, though. You know he can’t even walk the fences anymore.”

  “Speaking of,” Ceri interjected smoothly, “you’ll have to handle refreshing the wards on the outer fences next week, Milo.”

  “Why?” Milo titled his head. “Are you going somewhere?”

  She didn’t get a chance to answer because Glynn barreled on, “All dragonkin have at least one apprentice. I looked it up.” She leaned over the table, her fork abandoned so she could clasp her hands in front of her chest like the supplicant she apparently was. “What if something happened to you, Milo? Who would take care of the dragons?”

  Milo made an effort not to snort. “Ta for the touching show of concern.”

  “Are we still here?” Howell wondered with an amused look of incredulity aimed at Ceri. He gave his daughter a lift of his slick brown eyebrow. “Pardon me for interjecting a bit of reality into your ambitions, but Rhywun Ceri and I have been taking care of the—”

  “Yes, the dozen or so that stay on.” Glynn was clearly trying very hard to keep her tone reasonable. “But they don’t let you near them.”

  “They don’t let you either.”

  “Some of them do! I’m in the pastures all the time, and none of them have ever—”

  “By yourself?” Howell looked alarmed.

  Milo had to agree.

  “Nain used to take me all the time! I mean....” Glynn looked down, abruptly all-over red. “Milo’s nain. Rhywun Ysbain. She used to take me.”

  She looked… guilty. And sad. As though she thought Milo might mind her using the endearment, when in fact Milo knew his nain had encouraged it. Maybe Milo would have to have a talk with Glynn, too. Let her know that, just because he was back now, it didn’t mean she’d been displaced in her found family. He’d been so caught up in feeling like he didn’t quite fit anymore, he hadn’t even thought to consider that his presence might have disrupted someone else’s equilibrium.

  “And if I was around them more,” Glynn plowed on, “they’d probably get used to me. At least maybe they’d let me get close enough to look so I could tell Milo what to do.” She breezed right by the fact that Milo didn’t really need anyone to tell him what to do, and gave her tad a stubborn look. “You know you couldn’t do migration yourself if Milo hadn’t been coming home all along, not even with Rhywun Ceri’s help, and Na—Rhywun Ysbain wasn’t… well, I helped her a lot the last few years when she couldn’t....” She looked away, blinking, before she set her jaw and turned back to Howell. “And I saw you, Tad, just from helping Milo this past season and keeping up with the forge. You could barely walk!”

  For the first time, Glynn seemed genuinely concerned, rather than trying to implore her way into a new vocation. And Milo couldn’t help but notice that Howell didn’t deny it, merely pursed his lips and sighed again.

  Milo frowned. “Howell, is that true? Have you been having trouble walking?”

  Howell sat back with a put-upon air. “I’m not young. And neither are my knees.” He shrugged and reached for another potato cake. “But,” he said with a stern look at Glynn, “I’ll thank you not to start building my cairn just yet.”

  “I don’t mean it like that, Tad.” Glynn gave the appearance of a daughter suitably chastened, her head down and her shoulders slumped. But she was still giving Milo a calculating look from the corner of her eye.

  “Well.” Ceri reached over to pat Howell’s hand, her gaze soft, her hint of a smile tender. “I don’t suppose there’s harm in having help when it’s around to be had.”

  Howell rolled his eyes, but gave Ceri’s fingers a quick squeeze before he pulled his hand away and went back to his supper.

  They had an odd relationship, Howell and Milo’s mam, and not one Milo had any interest in dissecting in minute detail. Milo had gone away to school, and had come back on his first holiday to find that Nain had hired Howell to help run Old Forge, and that Howell’s daughter Glynn was adorable and insufferable by turns. Milo had liked Howell right away, and suffered Glynn like any eleven-year-old would suffer a child who was too precocious by half, and just sweet enough to prevent the occasional hiding.

  The next time he’d come home, Milo found that his mam and Howell had signed a courtship contract, much to Nain’s told-you-so glee. The time after that, Howell and Glynn had taken up residence in what used to be a gatehouse, back when Old Forge served double duty as dragon refuge as well as a minor fortress and lookout against invaders and pirates. Milo supposed they’d probably moved on to a conjugal contract, but had absolutely no interest in confirming the suspicion. So perhaps it wasn’t so much that the relationship was odd, but that Milo hadn’t really been around to see it develop into whatever it was now. Not a partnership, really, and certainly not anything defined by any legal contract terms Milo knew of, but....

  Anyway.

  They seemed to have no interest in calling the banns for a cariad contract, which... well, Milo had no idea how he felt about that. But since it was none of his business, he reserved the right not to think about it until he had to.

  “Right, then.” Milo shoved a forkful of fish into his mouth to cover for his other hand surreptitiously feeding some of his casserole to Lleu under the table. The cabbage in it would no doubt have Ceri howling murder at Lleu later, which was always funny, if one di
dn’t have to be in the same room with him. “I wish someone would’ve said something before now. Howell, I had no idea the load was getting difficult for you. I would’ve—”

  “Nine save me, I’m not that old!” Howell was indignant, but not angry. “I’ve plenty of good years left in me.”

  “Of course,” Ceri agreed. “But I think we’d all prefer it if those years weren’t spent crippled up and useless.” She gave Howell a sly wink that Milo was just going to pretend he didn’t see. “Glynn’s right—dragonkin should have an apprentice.” She lifted her eyebrow when Glynn sat up straight, face full of hope. Ceri’s tone was very stern when she went on, “Perhaps Milo might consent to hearing the case of an aspiring applicant”—she shot a speaking look at Milo—“on her birthday.”

  Milo looked from his mam’s expectant face to Glynn’s beseeching one. And found himself torn between not wanting to give in to manipulation, and at the same time wanting to lift some of what he hadn’t known was getting to be a heavier burden from Howell. It was difficult work, after all, and downright exhausting during the migration seasons, especially with the odd bit of blacksmithing mixed in with Howell’s more important forge duties. Ceri was edging in on fifty now, and Howell was at least ten years her senior. Not, as he’d pointed out repeatedly, old or decrepit by any means, but time and wear did things to a body. From a purely mercenary point of view, Howell was much more valuable in the forge than he was out in the pastures. It was only smart to keep him where he was most productive, and in good shape for as long as possible.

  And Glynn looked so pitiably tragic it was getting harder for Milo not to laugh.

  “Ugh, you’re making me want to pinch your head off.” Milo rolled his eyes at Glynn and chucked his napkin over his plate. “Borrow Rhywun Collins’s books. You have one week. And then”—he held up a hand when Glynn started to bounce in her chair—“there will be a test.”

  He hid his smirk as he rose and took his plate to the sink, Glynn’s squeals behind him so loud and piercing that Lleu joined in with a lengthy sonorous yowl of protest from under the table.

  “THAT WAS lovely of you.”

  Milo shrugged as he took the clean dish from Ceri’s hand and set to wiping it dry. “It’s her birthday. And.” He frowned as he set the dry dish on the small stack and took the next from Ceri. “I hadn’t really thought about it before. The apprentice thing. I don’t feel old enough or wise enough to have one. But it’s the safe thing to do.”

  It was a strange pseudo confrontation with mortality that didn’t feel very real, honestly. Glynn’s question—What if something happened to you, Milo?—had no doubt been a ploy in her effort to get what she wanted, but it had a weird resonance to it that he hadn’t truly considered as actual possibility until now. What if something did happen to him? Who would take care of the dragons? Howell was not, as he’d strenuously and repeatedly pointed out, old, but he was getting there. Ceri was too, and she wasn’t dragonkin. Nain had been the last real dragonkin, and Milo her apprentice since he’d been an obnoxious four-year-old and lolloped up to a spined howler to give its tail an impertinent pat, and didn’t get eaten or incinerated.

  Instead, the dragon looked him over with eyes four times Milo’s size, measured him, as Nain sidled up and set a hand to Milo’s shoulder. Nain had been bringing Milo out to the pastures with her since before he could walk. This was the first time he’d felt an impulse to touch, to interact, to make a bid for acknowledgement. He hadn’t really expected the dragon to comply.

  “What do you See?” Nain’s voice was soft but not afraid.

  Milo hesitated. He’d never Looked at a dragon before. Mam would have his hide, even though she got to do it all the time, but not Milo, never Milo, Milo had to hide it and never tell. It wasn’t fair. But because this was Nain, because it was their secret, Milo obeyed.

  It wasn’t the first time Milo had seen this dragon. They came and they went; sometimes they stayed for a season or two and let Nain see to them, and Nain would teach Milo which had what markings, why the cows were bigger than the bulls, where the different breeds lived and where they were heading.

  “He’s so… pretty.”

  He was. Astonishingly so. Not only the dragon’s hulking build and majestic expanse of wing, but what the dragon was, what Milo could See. The colors were manifold, churning in wave upon wave, gentle as the sea on a warm summer day, and twice as deep. Enticing. Welcoming.

  Milo reached out to touch them, felt them, telling him stories, letting him See. “He’s very old.”

  “He is.” Nain tugged the flaps of Milo’s bobble hat more firmly over his ears and squeezed his shoulder. “He’s my oldest friend.” There was a smile in her voice. “He’s been leading his clan since I was a little girl.” She gave Milo a tender jostle. “Find me a stone as pretty as my friend, calon bach.”

  Milo didn’t think there was one, but he scanned the mud anyway, apologizing in his head to the sluggish worms and bugs, the turn to spring not quite convincing enough yet to coax them completely from their winter sleep. Milo was careful with the mud he squished between his fingers, searching, until he found a stone dark and smooth—a bit of coal, maybe, weathered and worn with edges as iridescent as a dragon’s scales.

  Nain grinned when Milo handed it up to her, blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “That’s a fine one, all right.” She nodded approvingly as she handed it back. “Hold it tight. Close your eyes.” When Milo did, Nain asked, low and gentle, “How much d’you love the dragons, cyw?”

  “Lots.” Milo almost opened his eyes, but Nain hadn’t told him to yet. “Lots and lots.” As much as he loved Mam and Nain and crabbing on the pebbled beach on summer nights.

  “I know you do.” Nain sounded like she was smiling. “Now think about how much you love them, and toss your stone to my friend here.”

  Milo opened his eyes and frowned up at Nain, clutching the stone that tiny bit tighter. She’d just asked him to find it! And it was a rather nice stone. Shiny. Milo sort of wanted to keep it.

  “Go on, then, little heart. Don’t throw it at him, though. That would be rude.” Nain prodded softly between Milo’s shoulder blades. “Toss it right in front of him. He won’t mind. C’mon, I’ll help.”

  Milo scowled but let Nain take hold of his hand, going with the movement when she swung their arms gently together and said low into Milo’s ear, “Let go, love.” Milo did, and Nain told him, “Watch now.”

  Even as Nain said it, the dragon’s colors swirled up and out, wild and fierce, flaring in a stream as though reaching for Milo. Milo reached back, delighted, before all of it narrowed to a dense blaze of white, arresting and beautiful. An orange-silver glow ignited in the dragon’s belly, climbed its throat, scales flushing hot and steady as the coals of a furnace in deep winter. Milo smelled petrol and sulfur, the air all at once thick with it as the dragon opened its great jaws, teeth taller than Milo, and drew in a great, rumbling breath. Milo pushed back against Nain, startled, afraid, but the dragon didn’t snap him up for a snack or spit venom or flame at him; it sent a surprisingly narrow jet of bright-hot fire to the ground at its clawed feet—blinding, beautiful, terrible, terrifying—and when it stopped, in the small charred crater left in the spring mud sat the stone. The size of a red kite’s egg now, black and smooth as glass, a bloodshot smudge like a winking eye at its heart pulsing with a beat Milo suspected no one could see but him. Millennia eddied inside it, sonnets made of starfire, the infinite universes in the liminal spaces between drops of rain, the sharp taste of a pause between notes in accelerando, and all of it strong as worlds yet vulnerable as a naked back.

  I am Dragon, it said. We are Clan.

  “It’s a dragonstone now,” Nain told Milo, stern, as she crouched to his eye level and plucked the stone up, cooled now, but never cool. She held it out to him in the palm of her hand. “They’ve claimed you as kin.” She reached out and thumbed Milo’s cheek, fingers warm from the stone. “I rather thought they would do.”

/>   Milo had been small, too young to remember, really, but he nonetheless did remember every single thing about that day. The shrill, insistent calls of oystercatchers down on the rocky beach; his nain’s gray hair, loose from the habitual tail low on her nape, lofting about her head in the still frost-tipped sea winds; thick-bright spring sunlight splashed over mud and grass but Milo and Nain bent together close like secrets in the dragon’s shadow; Nain’s eyes, blue and dark like Mam’s and Milo’s, shining with pride; her face, so loved and loving, creased with age and smiles.

  “’Tis no small thing. But then neither is your heart, eh?” Nain looked down at the stone, her mouth turned up soft and pleased. “Their hearts and yours, twined and protected.” She set the stone in Milo’s hand—warm and smooth and alive—and curled his small fingers around it, safe and dear. “Not to worry, pet. You’ll grow into it.”

  Milo felt the weight now like a new thing in his pocket, so used to it being there he didn’t even really remember putting it there every morning and didn’t notice the small bulk of it unless he thought about it. Keys and watch and coins, routine and thoughtless, and always the warmth of that stone against his thigh.

  “Well.” Ceri set a stemmed crystal glass on the drying board, and swatted Milo’s hand away when he reached to dry it. “Leave it. Drying will smear it.” She took the cloth from Milo and wiped her hands with a thoughtful look. “Anyway, it was still well done of you. I know taking on an apprentice will be more work in the short run, but you could do worse than Glynn. She’ll work hard, and I swear the child wants to know everything.” Her shrug was fond. “If you can keep her focused long enough to not get herself hurt, she’ll be a good help to you.”

  “I won’t let her get hurt.”

  He would, however, set Glynn to helping collect the dragon manure from the pastures, if all went well. Old Forge made a proper penny on it, and Milo had enough to do without shoveling small mountains of shite every week.