by Nicky Kyle
"I… I don't…" Louisa glanced at the cluster of grumbling villagers, but none of them were paying the two women any mind. In the dim light from the smoldering hearth-fire it was unlikely that anyone sitting farther away from Dea than Louisa was would notice anything out of the ordinary in the way the firelight glistened a little more on certain patches of Dea's skin or caught in the cracks between the shiny scales.
Dea smiled and said gently, "I'm not much afraid of that dragon, either."
Louisa blinked. Her hand trembled against her lips. "Did…did a dragon do that to you?" she asked, her voice a whisper of horror.
Dea hesitated. "Not exactly," she said. "In a way, I suppose. It's not much of a story, though. Perhaps you should tell me about your dragon, instead?"
Louisa bristled primly. "It's no dragon of mine."
"No, of course it isn't yours." Dea smiled an apology. "Just the dragon that has been causing problems around here lately, is all I meant. I'm quite curious. It's not often one finds a town plagued by dragon-raids in these parts, and I'm interested to know more about it. Could you tell me about it? "
Louisa flushed pink. "Oh," she said meekly, "of course. Well, there's not much to tell, really. It's a dragon; it's been doing the usual sort of thing. Carrying off a few sheep, some goats, once a couple of chicken but we found feathers and—and bones and flesh just a few yards outside of town, so that might have been a mistake. Mayhap chickens squirm more than sheep, or mayhap it's that dragons don't much care for the taste of other flying creatures, I don't know."
"Dragons aren't that picky about their food," Dea said drily, then waved for Louisa to continue when she paused to stare curiously.
"Well… it gives us a bit of a scorching every time it flies over, and a few people have been singed but nothing too bad, nothing worse than a bad sunburn and a bit of burnt hair really; most of the houses have been blistered more than once although nothing's caught on proper fire yet, not the sort that really burns—"
"I notice the inn here seems unscorched." Dea waved a hand around the dim-lit room.
"And a good thing, too," Louisa nodded. "All the casks and barrels in here, and all those years of spilled drink soaking into the floor, I shudder to think what would happen if the dragon turned its fire on this old place! Pa frets himself into a swivet every time we hear so much as a flap of wings, and ma fainted day before last even though it was just crows overhead. They—we—can't stop worrying it's going to come this way next time and light the place up like a torch. Half the village would probably go up with it if it did; there'd be no stopping such a fire once it got going, with all that alcohol to fuel it."
"Fortunate that the dragon hasn't turned its attention this way then," said Dea, her voice bland.
"Very fortunate. It hasn't done much damage at all really," Louisa said with a shrug. "I suppose we've all been fortunate so far, although you wouldn't know it the way some complain. Summer's coming on soon though, and then things will start getting dry and it'll be a fair bit more dangerous than it is now, having a big scaly beastie flying around spitting sparks over our heads. We're all hoping that a knight will turn up afore then but it seems, if folk are thinking about it right," she jerked her head at the crowd of complainers around the hearth, "that we haven't got very much to entice one with, so perhaps that's unlikely." Louisa sighed dramatically and propped her chin on her hand, the picture of beleaguered misery in full commiseration with the rest of the crowd. It seemed more play-acted than anything else though, a child dressing-up in a borrowed attitude and pa's old boots that were much too big not to trip over.
Dea rubbed her chin. "I imagine most of the village's attention is on the dragon right now," she said slowly. Louisa nodded. "Lots of other things, the usual traditions and gatherings and so forth, are all being put on hold while it's out there, am I right?"
"Oh yes," said Louisa. "Nobody's much in the mood to think of anything else aside from the dragon, are they?"
"So none of the regular village festivals or celebrations—seasonal events, age-rights, weddings, all those sorts of things that punctuate regular life—I mean, how could you even think of making the effort of arranging a festival when you never know when a great fiery lizard might descend from the sky and ignite everything in sight? I'm sure that's what everybody's been saying about it."
Louisa shook her head. Her eyes flickered to the hearth and back again. "That's right, miss. Seems like it would be bad form too, celebrating much of anything when there's a dragon in the woods."
"No doubt." Dea drummed her fingers on the table. Her nails were thick, heavy things: a dark greenish-black color that contrasted sharply with her warm brown skin. The color made it look like she had been digging in some particularly putrid swamp and hadn't had a chance to clean-off yet, but they were more solid than human nails generally grew; more like claws than nails really. They made a hollow, heavy clicking sound against the wood that sent a shiver up Louisa's spine. "Well, I suppose the only thing to do is go and look around for myself."
"What?" Louisa scrambled to her feet when the taller woman stood up and stretched, arms over her head and back crackling.
"The dragon," Dea asked absently, rolling her neck across her shoulders, "does it only come during the day, or does it sometimes come at night?"
"Only during the day," Louisa answered, her voice faint. "So far."
"Shouldn't be any danger then," Dea said, adjusting her cloak and straightening her short brown tunic. "You'll look after my things for me?" she asked, jerking her chin toward the sagging pack that rested against her abandoned chair.
Louisa nodded but she didn't look happy, and not about having to be responsible for the other woman's possessions. "Miss, you can't—you can't be thinking of going to look for the dragon, can you?"
"Didn't I say to call me Dea?"
Louisa gave no reply but mutely raised glistening wet eyes in an unmistakable plea. Dea sighed, her own eyes lifting toward the skies beyond the inn's roof as if searching for empathy from some distant, airborne creature. "Oh, don't fret so. Of course I'm not going to look for the dragon. I just want to peek around, see what sort of damage it's done to the town, that sort of thing. And it'll be dark soon, so I'd best not wait too long."
"Miss—it's dark already, though," Louisa protested. "Why not take a room here tonight, look around tomorrow? We've very low rates and if you've not got the coin for it, ma is always happy to take barter for other goods, or you can exchange chores for board. We can always use an extra hand…"
"It isn't dark-dark," said Dea, as if she hadn't heard Louisa's offer. "More just…dim. And I have excellent night-vision besides." Before she flipped her hood back up the firelight caught her eyes at just such an angle as to make them look uncannily like a cat's: slit-pupiled and green. Louisa looked away. When she looked back Dea was wrapping her scarf around her face again, hiding that scale-pocked face from view. "No need to worry about me," Dea said, and patted the unhappy serving-maid reassuringly on the shoulder.
The griping cluster of villagers were so caught-up in their escalating complaints that they hardly noticed as Dea walked past them out the door and into the twilight lurking outside. She could hear their muffled calls for refills as the door swung shut behind her.
Several minutes of brisk exploration revealed that the village of Styesville would be quite prosperous if one held mud to be of great monetary value. Aside from that it boasted several scruffy goats, two herds of soon-to-be-sheared sheep, one rather elderly cow, and rather too many chickens to count. From the noises there seemed to be at least three pens that held pigs too but to the naked eye they appeared only to contain more mud, albeit mud that snuffled and snored and sometimes snorted. Dea smiled; she had always had a soft spot for pigs, who seemed so secure in themselves despite the crude and uncomplimentary things people so often said about the bristly beasts.
The mill at the edge of town held little interest for all that it seemed more prosperous than the rest of the town
. A few black soot marks showed that it had been paid some attention by passing flame but not enough to crisp its precise wooden shingles or blacken its waterwheel, possibly because anything so close to a stream in muggy spring weather tended to develop a certain dampness that would have been of great annoyance to a dragon trying to ignite its soggy wood, or possibly merely because the rich often possess an uncanny luck for avoiding whatever troubles were plaguing their neighbors. While the miller of such a place as Styesville could not be a wealthy man, everything was relative—especially coin—and by the standards of the small village the miller was decidedly better off than most everyone else in town. Dea had no sympathy for the cosmetic damage he had suffered, though she told herself she ought to since it was neither the miller's fault that a dragon had come to town, nor that his profession was a lucrative one.
The rest of the buildings had all been treated to a bit more attention than had the mill, but only a bit; the inn itself had been, as Dea had noticed on her arrival, miraculously spared but everywhere else she saw signs of blackened thatch and charcoaled shingles. The rest of the town consisted of fewer than thirty wooden buildings, most of them small and no more than one story in height with perhaps enough room for an attic loft under the thick, damp thatch. Being surrounded by a dense forest, wood was a cheap and readily-available material and everyone had built out of it. Only the blacksmith's forge incorporated stone as befitted a building that was used to having fire around, although that fire tended to come from the heart of the forge rather than from overhead and there was little to protect its wooden walls or shingled roof from an errant blaze. If a dragon visited the forge in earnest, the blacksmith's home would burn as readily as everything else in Styesville.
Most of the brush, trees, and grass in the town sported crispy black evidence of flame-kisses along its upper leaves and branches but oddly none of the crop-fields or orchards around the village looked like they had suffered from so much as a whiff of smoke. Dea kicked a prickly patch of nettles on the side of the rutted dirt road; a small cloud of ash rose, but the plants themselves sprang back into shape with the ease of leaves that were healthy and well-watered.
There were buckets, jugs, and barrels sitting everywhere through the town; those seemed to be a recent addition and most already held precautionary water. Dea wrinkled her nose, thinking of the copious breeding-grounds so much standing liquid would offer for insects in the summer.
She knew that peasants were not traditionally educated in matters of hygiene and it was not their fault if they were ignorant of the dangers posed by stagnant water, but even a few decades of travel had not erased entirely her disgust for such unclean habits, for all that she had grown almost accustomed to the lice and fleas that were one's customary companions in the beds-for-rent found on the road. (It helped that her cooler-than-normal body temperature held little attraction for such pests.) Still, she was glad that she would be far away from here by summer and, if things went as she hoped, the villagers wouldn't have any need to keep such unhygienic fire-prevention around by then and would thus be spared the inevitable insect infestation as well as the illnesses that so often resulted from such welts and swellings. She resisted the urge to kick the buckets over; even if she had explained the risk to the villagers they would doubtless prefer the threat of disease to the danger of being burned alive.
Dea walked to the town well, which at least had a sturdy wooden cover over it. There was a multitude of precariously-stacked vessels clustered around the circle of stone although those were mercifully empty. She skirted them with ease; the piles of crockery had been laid-out with wide paths between them, as though to allow a great number of people to run to the well without fear or tripping or trampling. The inhabitants of Styesville were a people well-prepared for ravaging flames for all that they had been but lightly-scorched so far.
It was all very interesting but not particularly surprising, Dea thought as she walked out toward the edge of town. It never did to act on assumptions though, and she wanted more evidence before she would let herself come to any conclusion, no matter how obvious the situation seemed at first glance. Even now there was one more thing yet she had to check before she could be sure she'd guessed right. And this particular guess would be an awful one to get wrong; Dea liked dragons, and would hate to be savaged by one by accident. She had to find proof of her supposition.
As she had told Louisa she did indeed have excellent night-vision and the haze of thickening twilight did little to hamper her investigation of Styesville, but in the end it was her nose that led her to what she sought.
Most folk walking down the dirt track that led from the village-center into the southern forest would never have noticed it—had in fact not noticed it for some days now, according to the stink—even if they had been looking (or sniffing) for it, as Dea was. While her nose wasn't nearly as acute as her eyes it was still a sensitive nose, and growing longer every day. Besides, the smell of carrion was unmistakable to someone who had spent so much time traveling alone on the road in places often inhabited by either hungry bandits, hungry animals, or both. There was nothing like the scent of meat rotting in the sun to warn a person to be on their guard, or maybe find a different path to take altogether.
This time rather than avoiding the stink Dea followed her nose back to the sickly-sweet source of the smell. When she left the road and headed into the field beside it she took as much care as she could not to crush the tender spring shoots of new wheat clawing their way through the damp earth, out of consideration for whatever nervous farmer was doubtless already fretting over his fragile harvest under the eye of an unpredictable dragon. She still left a trail of battered stalks behind her, clear evidence that nothing else had passed this way recently—nothing moving on foot, anyway, since hers was the only path of bent and broken stalks in the whole of the rippling, knee-high field.
Then she came to the blood-splattered hole of broken, flattened crops. They circled the thing she had smelled from the road. It had burst when it hit the ground and two or three days in spring sunshine and dampness had not improved its condition so it was hard to tell what species it had been originally, but there was enough red-dyed wool mixed amongst the rotting flesh and splintered bones that she was reasonably sure that she was looking at something that had once been a sheep—maybe two sheep even, but certainly no more than three; there wasn't enough meat for more than that even taking into account that much of it had been nibbled by carrion-feeders by now. Dea searched for a few minutes before she gave up on finding a stick, or a stalk firm enough to use like one, and poked the carcass gingerly with the toe of her boot instead. It went plorp and released a fresh bubble of noxious stink that made her gag; a number of buzzing insects rose angrily from the bloated flesh to protest the disturbance and the short, plump coils of maggots growing and gorging in the meat writhed in a fashion that caused unpleasant feelings in the pit of her own well-fed stomach.
Five fat crows that had been startled into flight by her arrival now watched her reproachfully from their seats around the edge of the unbroken stalks. Dea couldn't speak crow but she could recognize insults in a number of human languages and crow-epithets tended to be even more vulgar and pointed so she had little doubt that what they were saying about her interrupting their dinner was unkind. She gave the birds a polite little bow and returned to the road, considerately picking her way gingerly back along the same footprints she had left on her way into the field. She didn't bother to look up at the sky where the night's first stars were starting to flicker. Now that she had spoken to Louisa and seen the rest of the village, and those trembling villagers, and found that sad splattered carcass, she had a pretty good idea of what she was dealing with and she was no longer even a little bit concerned about the dragon.
Most of the inn's other guests had left by the time she returned; it was proper-dark outside now and Louisa was going around cleaning up the mugs and plates and bits of food left behind by the evening's trade. She was a dutiful girl,
probably the sort who made her parents proud in a bemused and distant sort of way—the sort of girl of whom people would say, "she'll make a good wife for someone someday," as if that was a compliment. Dea almost grimaced. She had probably received a number of politely-muttered "good eve's" and "pleasant night's" from the grumbling crowd as she had shown them out and she had probably had a cheery smile for every one of them in return.
None of the complainers were left now, although the two women weren't quite alone in the inn yet. One shriveled old man sat snoring noisily in a corner chair and two others of advancing age and receding hair sat bent over half-full tankards and a shabby checkers set at a table placed close enough to the fire to give them light but far enough away that their game would not have been disturbed by the evening's discussion of dragon-trouble. A handsome woman whose heavy muscles and soot-streaked clothes proclaimed her to be the blacksmith was counting out coppers on the table. Louisa stood next to her trying not to look like she was watching to double-check the amount. They both looked up when Dea opened the door, Louisa with a nervous smile that radiated relief like post-rainstorm sunlight and the older woman with politely disinterested curiosity.
Dea nodded amiably and retreated to her former seat at the far end of the room as the blacksmith left, her tab paid. Louisa lost no time in putting down her cleaning rag and tray of dirty mugs and rushing over. Dea was still unwrapping her scarf when the girl skidded to a stop next to the table, hands white-knuckled where she braced them on its edge.
"You're all right? You didn't meet the dragon?"
Instead of answering Dea shook her head and asked a question of her own. "When are you getting married?"
Louisa recoiled as though slapped. "When am I what?"
"Your wedding," Dea repeated amiably, "when is it?"
"I—it—we're not sure." Her eyes darted around the room, looking at everything except for Dea. "What with the dragon in town, anything like that has been delayed…"
