The Dragon Round

by Stephen S. Power

  Jeryon makes the catches increasingly difficult by tossing the crabs near branches and close to the cabin. After one throw he watches the poth through a window. Her lips count off every tenth second. She gathers her hair and twists it behind her neck. I’ll make her a comb, he thinks. Three tines. He’ll inlay each with a piece of polished shell.

  Gray sits beside him. He throws a crab near the cabin. Her angle to it causes her to clip a corner column. She squeals and flexes her wing. While she retrieves the missed crab, the poth appears in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “Crab Skeet. Watch this.”

  He flings the crab toward the porch rail, and maybe because he’s trying to impress her he gets his whole arm into it. The crab flies high and long. Gray gets a good jump, but has to slow to avoid hitting the rail. The wyrm doesn’t want to miss in front of the poth, so she rears her head to snap it forward to make up the last bit of distance. She drops her jaw to give her the best chance of catching the crab. And as the crab falls nearly into the poth’s hands the wyrm reaches out with her very breath to snatch it, blasting the crab, the poth, and the cabin with a long gout of flame.

  The cabin goes up like a brushfire. Culms explode from the steam trapped inside, spraying the porch with shrapnel. The poth screams, falls inside through a wall of smoke, and disappears.

  Jeryon rushes to the cabin, but the heat drives him back, air feeding the fire from all sides, turning the cabin into a chimney. His eyebrows singe and the ends of his hair evaporate. Air is sucked from his lungs. He shouts for the poth, but can’t hear himself, all sound blown from his ears.

  Gray darts for the doorway, which is filled with flame. Jeryon grabs her tail to keep her from destroying herself. Gray can breathe fire. That doesn’t mean she can withstand it. Gray snaps her tail, flinging off Jeryon’s hand, and slithers inside.

  Jeryon runs behind the cabin. The poth is at his window. It’s too thin and high for her to crawl out, so she’s chopping at the sill with his axe, the same idea he had. Her smock smokes where she’s beaten fire off it. Her skin is blistering. Her hair is full of wisps. Her eyes are crazed. Smoke pours out of the window, and she starts coughing too hard to swing the axe.

  “Give it to me,” he yells. She tumbles it out the window. He hacks at the bottom of the wall. When he strikes horizontally, the bamboo splinters instead of slicing neatly. When he strikes vertically, the axe breaks through the supports, but leaves the slats in place. He has to stop when he sees her fingers pulling at the slats from the other side, her mouth wide open, wanting air, while wind drafts under the deck to pour up through the floor.

  “Jeryon,” she cries, “I can’t get out!”

  “I will get you out,” he says. He’s crying too, but doesn’t realize it.

  He hears Gray inside. He hits the bottom of the wall with the axe and whistles three times. The wyrm attacks it savagely. An opening appears. Jeryon pulls the slats out, but they’re woven so tightly he can only remove one at a time. He gashes his hand on the bamboo splinters, and his blood soothes his own burns. The roof has caught. It’s about to collapse. The fire is in the columns too, and the whole cabin lists toward him.

  The poth sticks her foot through the hole, but that’s all she can get out. He says, “Your arms! Maybe I can pull you out!” She sticks one hand through and her head. They’re face-to-face. He pulls. She pushes at the floor of the cabin with her feet. They wedge her shoulder through.

  Gray chews at the slats trapping her other shoulder. That’s all they need, but they have so far to go. The bamboo frays. It will not break. Gray retreats. Jeryon whistles three times, but she doesn’t return. The cabin lists farther.

  “Go,” the poth says, terribly calm. She folds her body tightly against the wall.

  He keeps pulling. The cabin rocks toward him. A corner of the porch collapses sending a wave of fire around his legs.

  “Go,” she says and releases her grip.

  He grabs her hand again. Their blood seems to boil between them. She pulls his hand to her scorched cheek. He combs her hair away from her face with his other hand. Bristled clumps fall out and float away. A hunk of flaming roof thatch flops beside him and shatters. The underbrush around the cabin threatens to catch.

  He rubs a tear into her cheek. “Everlyn,” he says.

  “So you do know my name,” she says.

  3

  * * *

  Jeryon has hiked to the Crown to watch the sunrise. The spikes look like cenotaphs. Their shadows stab the west. The eastern sky is clear and pale blue where the night before it had been cranberry. A good day to sail.

  The wind topples a log on the remains of a large fire near the edge, and a wave of old ash blows over him. Maybe he should have set up a signal fire, he thinks, however difficult it would have been to maintain. Maybe a ship would have come.

  The sun crowns the horizon. Jeryon heads for camp.

  In the hollow, the dragon is a grove of rib bones too big for him to carry off. He could render them, but there’s a lucrative market for long bones provided they’re unspoiled. At some point he’ll sell them. The skull will be the greatest prize, despite his having removed the teeth to make tools. Mounted with its jaws open, it would make the perfect doorway for a shipowner’s home.

  The frogs at the pond have recovered. They make for good eating, but tough gigging. They’re more shy than they once were.

  At the shega meadow he gathers the last of the fruit from the tree and puts them in a dragonskin bag slung over his shoulder. He walks to the cliff’s edge. The dragonprint has vanished, worn away or swallowed by the meadow. The sea remains, endlessly wearing.

  Jeryon follows the stream to the beach and his salting operation. He puts seawater onto dragon skin stretched loosely in a frame, then uses a bamboo scraper to collect the salt after the water evaporates. He stores it in bamboo tubes for use in salting fish. The frames are empty now, as are the drying racks and salting crates lined with wing membrane. He hauls them into the trees. The salt tubes are already at camp.

  The new cabin faces where the last one stood, a mirror image except it’s elevated only half as high and the windows are even larger than those of the first cabin. Where the last one stood, asphodel grows.

  He sits on the porch. He won’t miss this cabin.

  He hears a rustling under the porch. Jeryon swings his feet. More rustling. He swings his feet higher and counts. One. Two. On the third upswing, he feints bringing his legs down and a long, wide snout snaps at where his much-repaired sandal would have been. He puts his foot on Gray’s head between her new horns. She can’t shake it off. Her tongue whips over her nose and licks him between the toes. That does it. He jerks his foot away and she pushes out.

  Her breath whips over him too. It smells like charcoal. She’s good about her fire now. She won’t use it around the camp and rarely uses it when he hasn’t commanded her to.

  When she does it’s usually to torch white crabs. The gelatinous phlogiston, which bursts into flame on contact with air, sticks to their shells, and she likes to watch them run around in a panic. Jeryon douses them before they set fire to the forest, although that, he’s come to understand, is one of her fire’s purposes: to light the brush and drive game into the open. Doing so once resulted in her discovering a hive of blue crabs, which normally hide when they don’t have a dragon to strip.

  Disappointingly, her fire also imparts a bad taste to food, like rancid oil, when used to light a cooking fire. So Jeryon trained her to use it on command by having her light a branch he could then use to light his fires. He wishes he could put the raw gel on the ends of small sticks, then coat the gel with a substance that could be rubbed off to set the stock on fire. The Trust would make gobs of money, and he would become the hero of housemaids and sculleries everywhere.

  Jeryon had thought that Gray getting her fire signaled the ons
et of adolescence and a new growth spurt, one that would make her large enough to ride soon, but it hadn’t. Perhaps she was traumatized by the fire. She wasn’t burned badly. Her skin is indeed largely fireproof. When she charged through the cabin wall just before the roof collapsed, she was more injured by the jagged ends of bamboo.

  He spent a week trying to wrap her wounds in healing leaves the way the poth had done for him, but she chewed them off. She was surlier than anything for a month, snapping at him and refusing to obey. Fortunately, the wounds healed well, the scars vanished as her top color hardened, along with her scales, to a slate gray, and six months later she began the growth spurt that’s still ongoing.

  As her neck emerges, she scrapes it against the bottom of the porch to remove some pale flakes of dead skin left over from her most recent shed. He lined the underside with long wedges of bamboo to help her and, more importantly, to reinforce the porch. They’re no use, though, when she has to scratch in the middle of the night and uses the columns, shaking the whole cabin. He’s worried she could bring it down, and he’s becoming worried she’ll grow so much one night she won’t be able to get out in the morning.

  Next come her shoulders, the forearms of her wings, and her elbows with their hand-long bone spikes. She uses them to hold things, pin crabs, stab beetles, and, most often, scratch her back. When he was breaking her to the saddle, she destroyed the first, a wicker number, with her spikes. And when he was breaking her to his weight by lying across her back, she nearly stabbed him several times. In one respect she’s trained him. When she twitches an elbow spike he scratches her back with a small rake. He put a strap to hold the rake on saddle number seven, which has a wooden frame covered in dragonhide.

  Now, her torso. Gray flattens like a cat and proceeds with little jerks. The cabin creaks alarmingly as the edge of the porch catches and releases her dorsal spikes like a clock’s movement. She finally pops free and reinflates. She’s seven feet at the shoulders, a foot taller than the tallest draft horse Jeryon’s ever seen, with a body like an aurochs, nineteen feet from snout to tail, with a thirty-five-foot wingspan. She weighs a ton, he estimates.

  To get this big, she ate six times a day, and nothing on the island was large enough to satisfy her. One week, when a pod of dolphins was migrating nearby, she ate ten of them, bringing each to Jeryon for his approval. The stink was horrific, especially when a few didn’t agree with her and she vomited them up under the cabin. At least she ate them again. Worse was their whistles and squawks and the way they flopped on the ground before she gobbled them.

  Her greatest catch was a whale calf bigger than her. To his horror she kept dropping it in the sea while flying to the island, then diving down to retrieve it again. He wasn’t sure if she couldn’t carry it very far or if she was playing with the poor thing. Eventually she dropped it into camp with such force it left a dent in the packed ground before the cabin.

  He takes his saddle, bridle, and other tack from a peg on the edge of the porch and puts them on her. To the saddle he affixes a dozen waterskins made of dragon skin, the bag full of shega, another full of olives boiled with herbs, sprinkled with sea salt and pepper and wrapped in palm leaves, and several spears with dragonbone tips. He figures this will last him several days. Of course if he doesn’t reach land, none of his supplies will matter. The dragon, which he’s flown in circles around the island to test her range and endurance, should be able to reach the land south of Yness in a day, but he’s not sure how far east he is and so could miss the continent entirely.

  Jeryon goes inside. He wonders what life will be like with keys. And without bamboo. In the common area he checks the barrel of water, as well as crates full of dried fish, fruit, olives, and spices. These should last at least two months. He evens up the bamboo spears standing beside the door. He ducks into his bedroom. There, beside his bed, is his blade. He puts it in the pocket of his dragonskin pants, a good luck charm now that he has a dragonbone knife with a bamboo handle.

  He pauses at the door of the other room. The cabin is silent. He steps in.

  4

  * * *

  Everlyn lies facedown on a wide bed beneath a dragonskin coverlid. He’s cut her hair close to disguise the places where it didn’t grow back, but patches of puckered skin betray them.

  She rolls on her side to show him the good half of her face. He kneels beside her. She says, “You’re going?” Her voice is raspy from her throat and lungs being burned.

  He nods. He glances under the bed. Her sword is there. Somehow it survived the fire. A bamboo spear is easier for her to use, but she won’t give in to one. Practicing with the sword, she claims, works her body and eases her mind.

  “I’ll see you off,” she says and sits up.

  He puts a hand on her shoulder. “No.”

  She shakes him off. “I can’t spend the week in bed.”

  “It could be longer. Maybe a month. Or two.”

  “Then I’ll have to get up,” she says. The blanket slides off her as she swings her legs over the other side of the bed. She wears only his old yellow shirt, which is long enough to reach her knees and worn soft. Her arms are crosshatched with pale white scars from where he pulled her through the hole Gray made, and they accent her wiry muscles.

  “Shall I do your back?” he says.

  She shakes her head. “I can do that.”

  “I want to.”

  She unbuttons the shirt and lets it drape over her hips. He uncovers a bamboo cup sitting beside the bed. The smell of honey and pepper fills the room. He spreads lotion on his palms and works it into her scars.

  He also works in a year of fury at his mates. He sees their names written in wrinkles and puckers. He sees their faces drawn in desperate flesh. They did this, he thinks. They made her choose. He would trade every minute of their two years together, he would trade their ever having met, if she could be whole again. Even justice will have to wait. Seeing his mates in gibbets won’t heal her. He needs a ship to get her off the island.

  The dragon isn’t big enough to carry them both on her back. He’d tested that proposition by hanging bags of rocks over his saddle. She found it difficult to take off and couldn’t balance in the air. Nor is she strong enough to carry one of them all the way to the League with her back claws. He’d tested that with a sling full of rocks. She’s fine for short distances, but Gray has to let go after a few miles. The poth is in too much pain to fly so he’ll go to Hanosh and bring back a ship.

  The Trust, he’s sure, will be more than accommodating in exchange for his services with Gray.

  He would fly to Yness, which is hundreds of miles closer, but no doubt they would kill him on sight and take the dragon.

  When the poth can stretch without feeling like her skin will tear, he lifts his shirt back up over her shoulders, and she rebuttons it. He comes around the bed and offers her his arm. Her feet are sore. She doesn’t often wear her boots, and her legs stiffen when she doesn’t move for a while. They go outside. He climbs off the porch into the saddle and straps himself to it. He and the dragon move together. They didn’t always.

  His first effort to ride Gray was comical, the dragon lying down before taxiing him around the pond for the price of a beetle per step. Their first flight was nearly tragic. They were on the beach and she flipped out her wings to toss him off when the wind caught them and threw dragon and rider into the trees. Their first real flight was little more than a hop across the shega meadow, but it was exhilarating for them both. For a moment they were one.

  Their next test was a glide from the meadow cliff to the beach. As they yawed and plummeted in the tricky winds, he realized he couldn’t steer the dragon the way he would a boat. He had to point out a destination and give Gray her head to figure out the best way to get there. As with a razor, he had to let the dragon do the work.

  Everlyn insisted on hearing everything, and he cringed a bit when relating
this part. She didn’t disguise her glee at being right about this and, by extension, so many other things.

  Soon he and Gray were making trips across the island, then circuits around it. They flew out to sea to the point where the island had nearly vanished and soared high enough for the sea to flatten into a smear of blue and white. Jeryon would have screamed with joy as they plunged had vomit not stoppered his throat. A month ago, he felt confident that Gray could stay aloft long enough to reach the League. He began preparations for leaving the poth. She began arguing to take the dragon up.

  He was apprehensive, given her pain and limited mobility, as well as her unfamiliarity with the actual process. She recited from memory every lesson he had learned. She said she wasn’t going to watch the first broken dragon in history fly away without having a chance in the saddle. Gray sensed her desire and would lower her neck beside Everlyn to let her sit on her shoulders. Jeryon couldn’t refuse in the face of joint opposition. And he had no right to, she reminded him.

  He would have called it a mutiny, but that would have spoiled the moment. Instead, he asked that she ride the next day. He wanted to prepare a surprise for her.

  The next morning he lotioned her thoroughly, she ate a fair quantity of boneset and golden shield, and he led her out to Gray, already saddled. Her seat was good, and the pain slipped out of her. He told her to end her ride by cruising over the Crown. She asked why. He remained clay-faced.

  At first the dragon flew close to the ground and so slowly she thought Gray might land. Everlyn couldn’t believe the dragon was babying her too. She yanked the dragon up hard. Jeryon’s stomach fell to hear her scream, then rose when he realized what a wonderful scream it was. It was the scream of the whole sky greeting the morning. He watched the dragon turn and glide. She was, he would tell her later, a great rider. As she passed by the third time, he could see she was getting fatigued, and he pointed at the Crown.