by Logan Jacobs
The warriors nodded and set about cleaning up, and I quickly joined suit.
I had wall duty tonight and didn’t want to be late for it. Mostly, I really didn’t want to get on Sela’s bad side when she was tired from being on guard all day. She seemed to stay in a constant state of anxiety when she had to be on the alert, and her stress had ways of spilling onto innocent bystanders.
There were roughly two hours of sunlight left when we approached the growing field, and I had a lot to get done in that time. I needed to eat, check on Talise and Nerissa, check the production of the sea glass weapons, get an arrow count, and get back over to the border wall. My mind was wandering, and I didn’t really acknowledge what I was seeing until I heard Mira gasp.
“What?” I asked as I pulled myself from my thoughts, but then I saw the fields, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. “Holy shit!”
Beautiful, lush, green vegetation had replaced the dry, decrepit plants that had been there when I first laid eyes on the field. Now, there were rows of perfect plants bursting with blooms, and some even had produce on them. I recognized green beans, English peas, carrots, and potatoes. There were other plants there that I didn’t know about, but I was excited about all of them. I needed to find the time to come and walk through it all with one of the field workers or even with Hali so they could tell me what everything was.
I leaned down, picked a pea pod off one of the bushes, and crunched right into it. It tasted as sweet as I had remembered. The peas weren’t fully formed yet, so the pod was tender and juicy. I also pulled a carrot out of the ground and was surprised to see it was purple rather than orange. It was still small, just barely formed, but I poured some water on it from the nearby basin and cleaned it off before I took a bite out of it.
“Wait, Ben, no!” Mira started as she reached out to me, but it was too late.
The purple carrot was definitely a lot less pleasant than the pea pod had been. I was expecting sweet and crunchy and what I got was bitter and grainy.
“Argh!” I yelled while I spit the gross carrot out all over the place. I chugged down half of the water in the basin as quickly as I could, and then I used some more of it to rinse out my mouth and hopefully get rid of all traces of the offending vegetable.
I looked over at Mira, and she was standing there staring at me like I had sprouted another head. George stood next to her with the very same expression on his face.
“What was that?” I asked the beautiful warrior.
“I can’t believe you just ate that,” she said as she continued to stare at me with wide gold eyes.
“I thought it was a baby carrot,” I retorted while I scraped my tongue.
“It is a bitter purple malanga,” she replied, and a smile started to twitch at the corners of her mouth, “and they are not for eating!”
“Now you tell me,” I grumbled.
We stood there and stared at one another for several moments until out of nowhere, a huge bubble of laughter erupted from my mouth. Then I started to laugh and couldn’t seem to stop. All the stress from the last few weeks decided to present itself in the form of laughter, and I just went with it. It was better than punching holes in the walls and shit.
After Mira got done looking at me like my sanity had just packed up and left, she started giggling and was soon laughing as hard as I was.
By the time we composed ourselves, a good ten minutes had gone by, and the sky had darkened considerably.
“Fuck,” I said to Mira, “we gotta get moving. We are on wall duty tonight.”
“Yes,” she agreed with a wince, “and I don’t want to infuriate Sela any more than I already have.”
We hurried back to the village and only stopped long enough for me to pick a few orchids and then continued on our way. I wasn’t going to have time tonight to spend with Talise or Nerissa before heading to take over wall duty, and I wanted to let them know I was thinking of them.
Mira headed upstairs to update the queen, and I stopped by the kitchens to grab some food to shove down my throat while I was on the go. Then I asked Hali to have someone deliver the flowers to the women, and at the last moment, I decided to add one of the shells from this morning’s lagoon dive to Nerissa’s bouquet. The shell was whole and unbroken, and it was a glorious shade of aquamarine that just matched her eyes. I hoped it was enough to keep her from being upset that I didn’t have time to come to her room before going to the wall for night duty. I couldn’t risk her seducing me, which she totally would do, and end up being late.
I continued my walk through the courtyard with George by my side, and I checked to see how the arrow production was moving along. The women had set up an assembly line of sorts, and they had turned out nearly a hundred arrows today alone. It was a very impressive amount, and I was more than pleased. I let them know what a great job they were doing and then moved on to the sea glass forging. This wasn’t going nearly as fast, but that wasn’t surprising. It took a lot more precision and attention to detail to get the glass to cooperate.
We had a good stock of sea glass already, since our regular morning swims had resulted in a very happy George. He was also getting enough to eat and was growing at a very rapid pace. He could no longer fit comfortably inside Talise’s hut and had started sleeping right outside the door instead. He was roughly the size of a full grown black bear and had become quite intimidating since his adult teeth had come in. I’d gotten a lot of laughs, though, during the two days he was missing his two front teeth, since he’d looked a lot more like a cranky old tortoise than a fierce dragon.
Every couple of days, though, he coughed up sea glass for me. I’d used sea water, sand, and a rough stone to hone it and shape it. I’d also taken bones from the boar I’d killed, fashioned a hilt for the sea glass blade, and then wrapped the grip with some of the cured hide. Like the previous warriors of the island, I’d taken hair from both Nerissa and Talise and braided it to adorn the cross guard and grip. The raven and silver strands twisted together and shone against the sea glass, and the effect gave the whole sword an ethereal glow. We’d been making daggers and more spears out of most of the other glass, except for a few particularly amazing pieces that I’d kept to add to the gifts for Nerissa and Talise.
“How’s it going?” I asked Darya. She’d shown a knack for working with the glass, so I’d asked her to lead the production of the weapons.
“We are having a particularly difficult time with this one piece of glass,” she told me with a frown. “It is the largest piece and will make at least ten hearty spears, but we can’t cut it with any means we have.”
I looked at the piece of glass she was talking about and could see tiny little dings and bangs in it, but nothing that made me think they had even begun to make a dent in it, so I held the glass up to the light to see if I could find a weakness anywhere that maybe they could use. Before I could even begin to inspect it, George snatched it right out my hands, sat down, and proceeded to chew on the piece of glass.
“What the hell, George?” I frowned at the dragon.
“Watch!” he said inside my head.
In just a few short minutes, he opened his mouth, and out fell a dozen pieces of glass that were the perfect shape for filing into spear heads. Then the dragon sat back and gave us all a look that clearly said he was very proud of himself.
Darya only encouraged this behavior by laughing at the dragon’s antics.
I rolled my eyes and decided it was time to move on, but then George let out a bit of a grunt, walked over to Darya, and spit two dragon teeth out at her feet.
“Need these!” he told me. “They break the glass.”
“You could have said something sooner,” I grumbled at him.
“Didn’t ask!” The dragon smiled at me.
Darya picked up the dragon teeth carefully, wrapped the dull ends in a cloth, and used the sharp ends to cut through the next piece of glass.
It was like a hot knife through soft butter.
She let ou
t a delighted squeal, patted George on his nose, and gave him a hunk of meat from the table behind her.
Great, now they were just spoiling the dragon.
I just let out a sigh and continued on my rounds. Things looked good, so I turned to head back down to the eastern coast. I met Mira coming out of the palace as the sun dipped toward the horizon, and we walked together to take over for Sela and Zarya. I told the warrior about George and the sea glass, and she found it as funny as Darya had.
I was going to have one spoiled rotten dragon on my hands.
When we arrived at the eastern shore, both Sela and Zarya seemed relieved to see us. They climbed down from the lookout tower before we were even fifty feet away. I’d seen Sela pacing back and forth as we approached, and Zarya had been staring out over the water intently. It was rather peculiar behavior for the both of them.
“What’s got you two all worked up?” I asked when we reached them.
“Sela has had this weird gut feeling all day and has not been able to settle down,” Zarya replied with a frown. “Her anxiousness has spread to me and has caused me to be on alert and vigilant all day, but nothing has been amiss.”
“I am willing to bet it’s nothing,” I assured them, “but we will be super cautious tonight regardless. Thank you for telling me. Both of you go get some food and rest. Maybe that is all you need.”
I hugged them both, and they went on their ways.
Sela looked back over her shoulder as she walked away, and she seemed reluctant to leave us. She’d also just been released from Talise’s care a little less than a week ago. She, unlike Mira, had approached me right away and told me she wished to hold off on mating until it was her fertile time. Sela was all business, that was for sure.
Another thing to be grateful for, especially with Nerissa the Nympho around.
“Go on,” I called out to Sela, “we will light the beacon if there is trouble. That’s why we have it.”
That seemed to pacify her a bit, and she turned and ran to catch up with the other warrior. I watched the two warriors walk away for a few moments and wondered to myself if there was anything to Sela’s concern.
“Does Sela have a habit of getting these gut feelings?” I asked Mira.
The warrior chewed on her bottom lip a bit, and she seemed lost deep in thought before she stopped to answer me.
“She actually does,” Mira answered. “The last time was when you washed up on the island. She insisted that something strange was going to happen and was vigilant about watching the shore for days before you showed up.”
“Okay, then,” I decided, “let’s make sure we stay focused tonight. Between you, me, and George, I think we can catch anything that tries to head our way.”
Mira nodded her head once in agreement before she climbed up the ladder and took up her post at the railing of the lookout tower.
George and I started our customary defenses check before we would join her. We walked the full length of the half-mile long wall so we could check to make sure the structure was still sturdy and nothing had fallen or gotten damaged. It was also a good time to relieve ourselves after eating and to let George sniff around for anything out of the norm, but it usually just ended up in him finding a snack or two. He had really gone a long way in culling the rodent problem around the island.
After about twenty minutes, we made our way back to the lookout platform, and both of us climbed up to find Mira looking out across the water with a deep look of concentration on her face.
“Do you see something?” I asked.
“Not a thing,” she answered with a sigh, “I guess I am just picking up on Sela’s concern.”
“I hope it’s nothing to be worried about,” I tried to comfort her, “but we will stay alert just in case. I wouldn’t want anyone else by my side for this.”
She just smiled at me and turned to look back out across the water.
George sat down next to her and copied her movements. It was crazy to think just a few short weeks ago, when we first got the platform built, he had to put his paws up on the top of the wall so he could see over it. Now, he could sit back and easily see over it. I was glad we had enough foresight to build the platform big enough for his ever growing size. I’d hate to think about the kind of fit he would have thrown if he had to stay on the ground.
I pulled some materials from my pocket and decided to work on one of the gifts I was making for the women bearing my children. I’d been contemplating on what to make for Nerissa and decided a piece of jewelry would be the best thing for her. I’d gathered strips of banana leaf and had soaked it for days in salt water to soften it to the touch. It now felt more like velvet than it did any kind of plant. It was also a pleasant off-white color that seemed to go well with anything I held up next to it, and I’d spent many hours sitting on this platform weaving and twisting the strands to create a chain. Mira had helped me a good bit, but the work was still mostly mine.
Now, I was focused on using additional strands to attach the smallest of the shells I found at the bottom of the lagoon along the main part of the chain. For the pendant, I had a gorgeous piece of sea glass that was swirled with veins of silver and sapphire, with specks of copper scattered inside. I’d found a handful of pearls in the shells I had collected, but only two of them were a deep gray color, and I planned on using those to accent the sea glass. I just had to figure out how to attach it all.
“Ben,” Mira suddenly said in a soft voice that immediately broke my attention.
I jumped up to look out over the wall, and my heart started to race. Did she see something? Were the raiders back?
“No,” she said with a hand on my arm, “I didn’t mean to alarm you. I just wanted to talk to you.”
I let out a big sigh, smiled at her, and was thankful that she hadn’t seen anything. I guess Sela had me on edge, too.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Umm, well … ” The warrior averted her eyes and twisted her long fingers together in an anxious tick that I’d noticed weeks ago.
“Mira, you can tell me anything.”
“It’s just, well, I know I have been acting odd ever since the arena games,” she began with a sigh. “I just didn’t know how to approach this with you. See, I have, umm, I have never mated with anyone before.”
I felt my eyes widen before I could stop myself, and it was enough to make her blush wildly and turn away from me in shame. That was definitely not my intention, but I’d never been good at keeping a straight face when someone told me something. All my thoughts were usually displayed for anyone to read.
But Mira was a virgin, and I was a damn idiot.
“Mira,” I said as I reached out for her, “there is no reason to be embarrassed. I was just shocked, that’s all.”
“You are not angry with me for not telling you sooner?” she asked quietly, and she still wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Not at all,” I assured her, “that is something you get to tell on your own time.”
“I’ve just been worried you would be disappointed with our mating, so I have been avoiding it,” she whispered.
“Mira,” I said as I pulled her to me, and I cupped her chin so she would finally meet my gaze, “look at me. There is no possible way, not once single fucking chance in this universe, that I could ever be disappointed by you.”
“Really?” she whispered as her golden eyes stared pleadingly into mine.
I pulled her even closer to me so she could feel the hard on in my pants that she alone had caused.
“What do you think?” I point-blank asked her.
The warrior laughed heartily and finally relaxed about the whole thing. Then I held her close, leaned in to kiss her deeply, and let her know in another way how much I wanted her.
“Come to my room with me in the morning,” I murmured against her lips. “Let me show you exactly what you do to me.”
She just nodded her head and blushed even more at my invitation, and I couldn’t wrap
my mind around her thinking she could ever disappoint me. I kissed her one more time just to seal the deal and then let her go.
“I will take first watch,” she told me, “you get some rest.”
“Alright,” I replied with a smile.
George had already gotten himself comfortable, so I curled up against him and drifted off to sleep pretty quick.
I was having another dream about building boats and sailing to the other islands. Ladonis had planted the ideas of exploring the other islands deep into my subconscious mind, and the urge had plagued me for weeks. I’d already made plans to gather the lumber before the storm season arrived and have it prepared so I could start working on the first boat during the breaks in the storms, but the old ass dragon had made sure I wasn’t going to forget.
Suddenly, a rumbling below me woke me up from my nautical dreams. I came to quickly and realized the sound and the vibration were both coming from George.
He sniffed toward the coast line and then growled.
“Danger,” he grumbled inside my head.
I looked up to meet Mira’s eyes and saw she was on total alert, too. She had ducked behind one of the posts and was scanning the water for signs of movement. I stood a few feet from her and scanned the jungle for the same thing. Since I’d bonded with George, my vision had greatly improved, even at night. So, it didn’t take me long to see movement near the northern end of the wall along the edge of the jungle.
I gently touched both George and Mira and pointed to the disturbance I’d seen. It could be a wild animal, but I doubt that would have put the water dragon on alert. All three of us crouched as low as we could and watched the area intensely.
Then we saw three shapes make their way out of the jungle and start creeping toward the fence, and the dark figures were roughly the same height and width of the last raiders who had attacked.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and a growl grew deep in my chest.
