Milo shot a look to the sky—empty but for a small flock of sanderlings, thank every goddess—then back over to where Cennydd was eyeing the little nanny warily, like he wasn’t eyeing the sky.
“Cennydd,” Milo said, low and clear. “Get over here next to me. Leg it. Right now.”
Instead, Cennydd paused. He blinked at Milo then… beamed. All wide-open and thrilled, as though he’d won a prize. He nearly skipped as he started toward Milo.
“Coming!”
The goat examined Cennydd’s bottom as he passed like she was wondering how loud he’d scream if she rammed it.
Milo wouldn’t mind finding that out himself. He shook it off, keeping an eye out for any dark shapes in the sky until Cennydd was close enough to grab. When he was, Milo did, by the collar, and hauled a surprised and protesting Cennydd over the fence until he wobbled to an equilibrium sufficient enough to feel it when Milo shook him.
“Oi, what—?”
“How did you get out here?” Milo snapped. “Why are you out here?” He pointed toward the other end of the pasture, boiling with either anger or alarm. Probably both. He shook again. “D’you know what’s beyond those trees, Cennydd? Do you?”
“Oi, geroff!” When Milo didn’t, wouldn’t, Cennydd tried to twist out of Milo’s grip, only succeeding in screwing the handful Milo had of the coat into a tighter ball. It took Cennydd a few seconds longer than it should, but eventually he stopped trying. He shot Milo a wounded look. “Of course I know! That’s why I—”
“That’s why you’re not supposed to be here!” Milo shouted it. He couldn’t help it. “Do you understand that you just pranced blithely across a buffet spread specifically for dragons?”
Cennydd scowled. “Dragons don’t eat people.”
“Usually. Usually dragons don’t eat people. Because we give them pastures full of other things to eat. A pasture you just toddled through like a tasty little nibblet amongst all the other tasty little nibblets.” Milo uncurled his fingers and shoved Cennydd back, seething. “How easy d’you think it would be to tell you apart from the goats from ten furlongs up?”
“They wouldn’t.” Cennydd’s tone was defiant and sure, but his glance kept skimming upward now. Finally. “They’re smart. They know. You say so all the—”
“They know their boundaries. They know where they’re safe. They know dragonkin. They don’t know you. They don’t know you’re not here to try to harm them, or take from them, and if you’re in the middle of their hunting grounds, it’s quite likely they won’t know you’re not food!”
Cennydd flung a scattershot look toward where the ageless pine coppice broke the flat moor and formed the border of the pasture. Except for a wide expanse pressed flat and treeless by generations of dragons lumbering through it to wait for an easy hunt.
The nanny ambled closer, curious, then fetched up short of the fence and gave them a demanding bleat.
“This,” Milo told Cennydd, as calmly as he could, “right here, where we’re standing—this is a feeding pen, where the dragons who can’t fly come to eat.” He slapped the gate post. “This is where I push a cow through, or a few sheep, or some goats, for the dragons who can’t hunt for themselves. Right now I’ve got a snarly little spitter who’s got a limp but can still outrun you and is as big as a small cottage, and she could not only snap you up like a particularly rubbish snack, she could spit her venom at you first so you’d be paralyzed but awake while she gutted you.
“But sometimes, Cennydd—sometimes, a dragon doesn’t feel like hunting or working too hard for its supper or waiting for me to shove a cow through the gate. And do you know where they come when that happens?” Milo didn’t wait for Cennydd to answer, only waved toward the pasture Cennydd had just lolloped through, and said, “Right here, Cennydd. Right to this nice, easy banquet spread out just for them.”
Cennydd had slowly gone pale while Milo ranted, and now he was going a bit green.
Good.
“How did you get out here?” Milo pressed. “How did you get past the wards on the outer fences?”
Those wards were there for a reason, after all. To keep curious idiots like Cennydd out.
Cennydd opened his mouth. Flapped it. Closed it.
“I need to know.” Milo eased his tone, gentled his voice. Until a thought struck him, and he couldn’t help the way everything turned sharp again. “Was anyone else with you?”
Because if there was some other bonehead out there roaming the fields....
Milo again scanned the sky, but only saw the shape of one of the wranglers far off over the sea, winging out wide and lazy, so not on the hunt. Nothing in the trees, so far as he could tell.
“It’s only me.” It broke into a wobbly squeak toward the end, either righteous fright or the remnants of teenaged changes.
“You’re sure.” Milo took hold of Cennydd’s collar again, but in a looser grip, and he didn’t shake. “You’re positive. If you’re lying to me, Cennydd, someone could actually die, and you’d be the one who—”
“There’s no one else.” Glaring now, Cennydd shrugged Milo off. This time Milo let him. “I came alone.”
The way “alone” came out this close to bitter… Milo believed it.
Cennydd was almost as tall as Milo now, though still lanky and awkward with a growth spurt he hadn’t quite negotiated yet. Only a year older than Glynn, he was beginning to grow into himself, but he was still spotty and butterfaced and graceless, and had yet to learn that his tad’s wealth and his mam’s position on the Whitpool council didn’t buy him the respect of those he clearly wished would bow to his adolescent rule. Milo had watched him trying in all the wrong ways since Cennydd was a stroppy little creadur who thought bullying a fine and proper path to the esteem of his peers. For a clever boy, he had yet to figure out why it hadn’t as yet gone to plan.
Milo sucked in a calming breath and nodded. “All right. Good. But that doesn’t tell me how you’re here.” He gave Cennydd a level, I’m not playing look. “How did you get past the outer fences?” He narrowed his eyes. “Are you the one who’s been messing with the wards?”
“No!”
“You tried, though, yeah? You’ve been trying, haven’t you? All this time you’ve been grizzling at me to bring you out to see the dragons, you’ve been skulking the fences and trying to get past them.”
Cennydd flushed and looked away. “I didn’t do anything! I was only… there was....” He set his jaw, angry now, as though he had a right. “I can’t help it if your wards are pants.” His shrug was entirely unapologetic, and he’d gone from frightened and semicontrite directly into righteous resentment. “Maybe you should be apologizing to me. If I tell Mam how easy it was to—”
“Yes, tell your mam what you’ve done today, Cennydd. Please. It’ll save me the trouble of doing it myself.” Milo took a step in; it was too clear that Cennydd only barely kept himself from taking one back. “Tell your mam you illegally entered a preserve protected by Her Majesty’s laws. I mean, you’re not of age yet, and I’m sure your mam will use her connections to keep the Wardens from actually arresting you, so you likely won’t—”
“I didn’t—!” Cennydd had been in the process of puffing out his chest and squaring his shoulders. Now the building bravado collapsed back down into a teenaged boy who’d been caught failing to use the sense he’d been born with. “I didn’t… mean to.” He caught Milo’s look of disbelief. “I didn’t! I mean, I always check the fences. Just in case, you know? But the wards are always so tight and strong, and… I dunno. I stopped hoping to find a weak spot ages ago, but it’s… it’s habit now, I guess.” He frowned down at his expensive shoes, probably ruined now with the mud and goat droppings he’d been tromping through. “And then there was one, so....” He trailed off with another shrug, this one clearly uncomfortable.
Milo was still angry, still anxious and outraged and sixteen different kinds of alarmed, but this… this he believed. Cennydd was no mage, he couldn’t possibly have
queered even Milo’s weakest wards. If he was sensitive enough he could find them, maybe even figure out their patterns. But there was no way he could break them.
“…All right.”
Milo sighed and ran a hand through his hair. This was going to take longer than it usually did. With the thinned spot he’d just found, and the one Cennydd had managed to get through, Milo was going to have to thoroughly reinforce every inch of fence, rather than the usual spot-checking and general strengthening. And he was going to have to make a report to the council that someone had been at the wards.
Blood and rot, he was supposed to leave for Brookings the day after next.
“Right, then. Damn it all.” Milo took a step back, giving Cennydd room. “I need you to show me where.”
“I....” Cennydd’s glance went from mortified to calculating to, oddly, hopeful. “I will.” He stood up straight. “After you show me a dragon.”
Milo gaped. He nearly laughed, incredulous. “Cennydd.” Now Milo was the one pushing out his chest and pulling back his shoulders. “Are you trying to blackmail me?”
“Naw, mate.” Unbelievably, Cennydd grinned. “Fair trade, innit?”
“Trade. Trade. For you trespassing on a protected preserve, and nearly getting yourself eaten? I’d say a fair trade for that is saving your life. Which I just did.”
“Tch.” Cennydd waved it away. “It would only be saving my life if there’d been a dragon to eat me. Which there wasn’t.” He dropped the grin and turned supplicant. “Please, Milo? Please? I’m already here, and I’m with you, nothing will happen, and I’ll never do it again, I promise, I swear. Please? Please? Milo, c’mon, mate, I only—”
“We’re not mates, Cennydd, you’re a trespassing little gobshite who—”
“—want to see one up close, that’s all, and if you show me, I’ll even stop checking the wards. Please. Milo, please, I’m begging—”
“Ugh, you are. Save me, on you go like a minging pepper mill, and it’s making me nauseous. Stop.”
Cennydd did. But he didn’t lose the imploring expression nor the sick-making pose of blameless obeisance. Gah, he looked so much like Glynn, right down to the hands clasped in front of his chest, and the gormless pout.
Milo was still angry. And a little bit shaken.
Cennydd was a tit and too bloody arrogant by half. And not the good kind of arrogance, not the kind that was backed by skill and knowledge and practice. Not the Ellis kind, since Milo’s brain never seemed to stray too far from that particular subject these days.
Cennydd’s arrogance was the kind that grew from being excluded a little too often, or included for all the wrong reasons. The kind one put on like a recalcitrant, unlikable mask to hide the hurt of rejection. And Cennydd was recalcitrant, and he was unlikeable, standing there looking both wronged and hopeful, like he had a right to either.
But he was also a boy who desperately wanted to be liked, and just couldn’t seem to ken how to arrange the learned social cues and graces into the proper shapes. A boy to be pitied, really, because if he hadn’t got it by now....
Milo glared into the beseeching hazel eyes, the podgy, spotted face, the awkward limbs and flat brown hair.
He growled.
And decided he was altogether too biddable when it came to being on the receiving end of determined begging.
“WHAT’S HE doing here?” Glynn’s scowl was fierce, and the betrayal behind it was unmistakable.
Milo sighed and pushed Cennydd ahead of him, though he tugged him back by the shoulder of his coat when it looked like he meant to just keep going across the stone floor until he actually fell into the forge. Milo wouldn’t put it past him. The firepot was full and hot, the slow feed from the hearth roasting coal into coke, and the chimney of the bloomery was blasting so intensely Milo was already sweating.
“It’s a long story,” Milo told Glynn, then turned to Howell, who’d paused by the tuyere to stare at first Milo, questioning, then Cennydd, suspicious. “Sorry for the intrusion,” Milo said. “But with your permission, I’m going to let Cennydd watch you give the dragons their rations.” He turned to Cennydd, said, “Stay,” before moving in as close as he dared to Howell and lowering his voice. “Just trust me for now, yeah? I’ll explain later.”
Because if Milo could sate Cennydd’s obvious curiosity, and give a bit of a boost to his clearly low self-esteem in the process, maybe he’d stop pulling Glynn’s pigtails long enough for the two of them to, if not become friends, exactly, then to at least stop antagonizing each other enough that it came to blows.
Howell gave Cennydd another skeptical look, but nodded at Milo with a very clear I’ll hear that explanation, and it better be good and went back to work.
The smithy sat at the very edge of the eastern boundary of the preserve, straddling the fence with its entrance on the outside so anyone entering wasn’t doing so from within the spaces designated dragon territory. The open back end of it was caged with a thick iron grid, which wouldn’t exactly stop a determined dragon, but should slow it down and give whomever it might be after a chance to scarper. Not that it ever happened. The dragons knew who kept their fires burning. It was why the preserves that dotted the migration paths were their favored places, and why—in Milo’s considered opinion—the dragons had never been a threat to anyone who respected their claimed spaces.
“…not only feeding them hot coal,” Glynn was saying while Cennydd watched, awed, as two dragons drifted to graceful landings in the yard outside the caged opening. “We have to replicate what they get out of the volcanic rock in their habitats, so there’s smelting to be done as well.” She pointed to the arms of the long iron gutters that formed a “Y” between the belly of the forge and the crucible of the bloomery, then joined to a single runner that flowed out through the only opening in the gridwork and ended over the trough from which the dragons fed. “Iron, aluminum, different ores and alloys—that sort of thing. Tad has to get the mix just right, or they can’t digest it properly and their fires will go out.” There was a great measure of pride in Glynn’s tone. She relayed the information as though imparting a rare and treasured nugget of wisdom, explaining the differences between conduction and convection, what oxidation was and why it was interesting.
It was clearly all lost on Cennydd. Milo wasn’t even sure Cennydd heard it, too caught up in watching the dragons snapping at each other with their usual posturing, nipping at haunches or necks as they each vied for the ideal spot at the trough while they waited.
Milo was pleased to see the spitter emerging from the pines to the south, and even more pleased to see she was still keeping company with the razorback. He was too old to offer much protection from the others if the spitter managed to get too bold for her own good, and he walked more than he flew these days. But he was huge and held an unquestioned position of respect within the hierarchy of the makeshift clan, the members of which, for one reason or another, had been unable to complete their migration this season and taken up temporary residence here. Milo was surprised but grateful that the elderly razorback seemed to have the patience to take on a calf as ornery and obnoxious as the spitter. If she could manage not to annoy her apparent mentor too much, she might actually learn how to be a dragon.
Howell was keeping count too, because it wasn’t until all fourteen were out in the yard that he picked up the tongs.
“Keep him away from the runner,” he said, terse, as he opened the gates and tipped the crucible, decanting it into a pool at the riser before letting it flow along with the ore and slag and coke to a burning slurry that seared its way down the runner and poured out into the trough.
It made the space a hundred times hotter. Milo found it necessary to remove his coat and fan himself with his cap. Cennydd probably should have at least taken off his coat—his skin glistened with sweat, and his lank hair was plastered to his forehead—but he didn’t appear to have the thought processes available right now. He stared with an open-mouthed smile, entranced, as th
e dragons slurped from the trough, the glow of the molten metal and rock slicking against scales and pushing shadows into angles that made them look like something from a painting or a fairytale illustration. Never mind that they never stopped growling at each other, or shoving and jostling at each other like toddlers, or that the sound of the gritty crunch of smoldering chunks of coal between massive teeth was enough to make Milo clench his own with a shudder.
None of it seemed to register with Cennydd, who looked to be in raptures, never losing his awed smile, and taking hold of Glynn’s sleeve as though to ground himself. The fact that Glynn didn’t shake him off, didn’t even scowl, made Milo decide that bringing Cennydd here, letting him see what few could, had been the right thing to do. Even if it had come about through half-arsed blackmail.
“Not everyone thinks we should feed their fires.” Glynn’s voice was soft, with a hint of disdain.
Cennydd frowned, but he never looked away. “Whyever not?”
“They’d be less dangerous if they didn’t have fire, innit?” This time, the disdain all but dripped.
“That’s just… stupid. And cruel.” Cennydd huffed as though personally insulted. “They wouldn’t be dragons without fire. Or half as beautiful.”
A corner of Glynn’s mouth turned up, satisfied. She didn’t say anything, only stood there with Cennydd and watched the dragons eat fire.
Milo absolutely did not smirk in satisfaction, though he did give Howell a pointed glance along with a lift of his eyebrow.
Howell glared back. Then he took off a glove for the apparent sole purpose of flipping Milo off as he gave the back of Cennydd’s head a sour frown.
It would be very insulting, Milo told himself, to laugh right now.
He wondered if Howell would be pleased or even more annoyed when Milo broke the news to Glynn tomorrow that he’d be filing the paperwork with parish council to formally take her on as his apprentice.
Chapter 6—Idée Fixe
Sonata Form Page 10
