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ANY FOOL CAN SWING a sword, but it takes finesse to talk to a woman.
—Yolan Manespike
* * *
THE BROKEN WHEEL TAVERN hosted a noisy crowd on most evenings. The patrons consisted of tradesmen and laborers, by and large, which meant the ale was cheap but plentiful. Like many such establishments, the reek of stale beer clung to the very stones of the floor. The cheery red glow of lit pipes dotted the hall, and a smoky haze and rich aroma filled the air. The pair of serving girls and the proprietor were kept busy, ushering food and drink to wherever needed.
By the time Onin arrived, Hangric had already secured their usual table by the fire. They clasped hands, and Onin gestured to the nearest serving girl. In less time than he would have thought possible, a full tankard sat in front of him. He and Hangric lifted them in the customary toast.
"To the king."
They made a point to meet at least once a month, as their respective assignments allowed. They had tried several other establishments before settling on this one. Initially the friends would rendezvous at inns or taverns closer to their homes, but the circumstances never quite worked out. In those places too many patrons were social peers—members of other Great Families, other Guardsmen, officials of the chancellor, and so on. It made it impossible to speak on any subject comfortably for fear of eavesdroppers. Instead, they settled on the Broken Wheel. No socially conscious people of the Heights would ever be seen there. The place provided a haven where they could speak freely among themselves, a surprising rarity.
"What news from the outside?" said Onin.
Hangric had just returned from a short stint in the Midlands, and Onin was due to ship out himself the next day.
"Three feral attacks in the last two weeks," said Hangric grimly. "In one case, a single beast demolished a remote farmstead, but the two most recent were flocks attacking verdants. The most recent happened yesterday. We caught wind of it as we were shipping back to the Heights. From what we heard, the verdant dragon went down somewhere over Wheatmarch."
"Flocks of ferals? I didn't know that could happen."
"It's rare. Usually only happens over the black swamp."
"Did you see any ferals yourself?" asked Onin.
"No," said Hangric with a sour expression. "Never in the right place at the right time. If the attacks had some rhyme or reason or if we could guess what the targets might be, we could take better precautions. As it stands, by the time we even hear about a feral dragon, it’s long gone."
Onin could only nod in agreement. "The great beasts are too cunning to attack our strongly defended outposts," he said. "But two attacks on verdants? I wonder if there’s a pattern forming there."
"Hard to say," replied Hangric sagely. "The skies were clear when I flew, both there and back. The most dangerous thing I had to do was climb into the blasted tierre for the return trip.” He took a long pull from his tankard. "I’ll wager your unit is on its way to the downed verdant," said Hangric. "For all the good it will do. Once one of those beasts goes down, it stays down, my captain says." He looked up. "Here comes Fargin."
Fargin plopped himself down at the table, snatching a tankard from a passing tray over the serving girl’s protests. He drank deeply then wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
"He seems full of vigor," Onin said to Hangric with a sly grin. "I think married life agrees with him."
A smile split Hangric’s face. "Well, I’d be agreeable if I were married to the sweet little dish he calls wife," joked Hangric.
"Speaking of which, how is Horseface?" asked Fargin. No one dared call Hangric’s wife by the name in her presence, but her equine features remained undeniable.
"Norietta is doing just fine," said Hangric. Then he frowned thoughtfully. "Her new passion is dancing. Courtly dancing." The big man shuddered. "I always step on her feet. But she insists I accompany her all the same."
The three friends drank, laughed, and ate while waiting for the last of their number to arrive.
"Where is Rabbash?" asked Hangric while waiting for more ale. "He's the one who called us together. Said he had something very interesting to talk to us about."
Hours later, Rabbash had still not shown, and a bad feeling grew in Onin’s gut. If not for the need to get up early for his deployment to the Midlands, he would have accompanied Hangric and Fargin to Rabbash’s home, but they assured him they would let him know if there were something he could do. No matter what they said, it was an ill omen.
* * *
THE GROUNDED VERDANT cried its anguish to the sky, answered by another circling overhead. Onin usually heard a verdant roar its displeasure with sass and attitude. This sounded different; the honking cry of the massive beast expressed heartache, and the replies from the airborne verdant echoed it. Onin pined for the creature as it stretched its neck to the sky and its fellows.
Claw wounds marked the back and flanks of the great beast. Only the barest remnants of the harness and rigging that held the tierre in place remained intact, flapping about like loose strands of hair. Of the tierre, there was no sign at all.
"Glory be, that’s a sight," said Captain Bolg from beside him. Onin had been pleasantly surprised to find the ugly man had not only been promoted but also assigned to lead this mission. "Once one of those brutes goes down, it's all over."
The dragon shifted its bulk, taking a few halting steps before settling to the ground again. Once again, it released a mournful cry, echoed by the airborne dragon.
"Couldn’t enough food be brought to her?" asked Onin, grasping at solutions.
"Possibly, but even then there’s no way to get her back in the air," said Bolg. He rubbed at the red scar on his face. "She’d have to walk all the way to Dragonport and climb up the mountain to have enough altitude to take flight again."
Onin nodded grimly. The dragon could hardly take a dozen steps before needing to rest its legs. It seemed unlikely it would be able to scale a mountain, even if it could cover the distance overland. Verdants were built to fly, not walk. It made him think breeding the dragons purely for size had been a huge mistake. How could people have been so foolish? he asked himself, but he already knew the answer: greed. It was a problem that ran deep and would not be so easily remedied. "What do we do, then?" he asked.
"The only thing we can do," said Captain Bolg. "Find a humane way to put the poor beast down."
Onin didn’t like that answer one bit. It seemed like such a waste. His association with the Manespike family business gave him a deep appreciation for the amount of work that went into breeding, hatching, and raising dragons. But he was also without any notion of an alternative.
"How does one go about such a thing?" Onin wondered aloud. Verdants were enormous and their scaly hides, unbelievably tough.
"I don’t know," said Bolg. "The dragon riders have a concoction, I hear, but it is slow to act and unpleasant. They dislike using it in the extreme." Which made sense to Onin; the dragon riders were notoriously meticulous when it came to the care and feeding of their charges. "In cases like this, it’s poison or let the creature starve to death."
Both men grew silent as they contemplated the situation. Their reverie broke, however, as sudden darkness engulfed them. Onin realized he stood under a shadow, one in the form of a dragon. A feral dragon.
The feral soared over them and pounced upon the unsuspecting verdant. The dark dragon sank its teeth into the base of the verdant’s right wing. The black-scaled form clung to the larger dragon’s back tenaciously, digging its claws into the great scaly flanks for better purchase. The verdant raised its snout to the sky and roared in pain while a second feral dragon swooped in, maw gaping to snatch the great throat.
The verdant wasn’t completely defeated, however. At the last moment, the great snout turned to meet the second attacker, and the verdant’s massive jaws closed over the head of the feral. The feral’s wings flapped erratically a few times before the verdant bit down, ending the dark-scaled dragon with a single bite. The verdant swung its mighty head, flinging the dead feral through the air.
Bolg and Onin scrambled for cover as they realized the dead feral sailed directly at their location. Onin made it a half dozen steps before tripping, landing face-first in the dirt. Instead of trying to rise, he covered his head with his arms and hoped for the best.
The ground lurched. A cloud of dust and debris engulfed them. Onin coughed dirt from his lungs but was again plunged into persistent darkness. Something soft but heavy, like a leather tapestry, draped itself over him and pressed him to the ground. He fumbled about and pushed against it, scrambling toward slivers of daylight.
From the dead feral dragon’s wing, Onin emerged. His fellow Guards were dashing about, calling out to one another. He could hear the cries of the wounded. Not all of them had made it a safe distance away.
Another tremendous roar tore through the air. Onin felt it in the pit of his stomach. A third feral dragon attacked the ailing verdant. This one had more success in its swooping ambush. As Onin watched, the newly arrived feral pinned the verdant’s head to the ground and savaged the long, scaly neck with its claws.
Yet another verdant roar drew Onin’s attention skyward. He looked up to see the airborne verdant dragon under attack by ferals as well. Easily a half dozen ferals darted in and out, attacking the bulky dragon from multiple directions, enough to overwhelm the great beast. The verdant, or its handlers, decided to exercise discretion and set its course for home with the ferals in hot pursuit.
The cacophony of dragons locked in mortal combat brought Onin’s attention back to the ground. The grounded verdant still struggled but seemed unable to resist the two vicious feral dragons. With the pair of dark-scaled dragons on its back, the verdant lacked the strength to even stand, let alone fight effectively. Despite the noise, the fight was as good as over. Onin wasn’t the only person to realize it.
"Retreat!" yelled Bolg to the Guardsmen. His voice cut through the snarls and bellows of the dragons. "Grab the wounded and get out of here! Now! While the ferals are distracted!"
The men, realizing the sense of his words, made haste. Onin stopped to lift a wounded man to his feet. The fellow’s leg was broken, struck by the hard edge of the wing as it landed on them. Onin tossed the man over his shoulder, to his protests, and ran as fast as he could.
The sound of dragons fighting receded in the distance, and the Guardsmen made good their escape.
* * *
THE REST OF THE TWO-week tour of duty proved blissfully uneventful. Onin was thankful for some time to digest the events he had witnessed. He hadn't quite acclimated to the sheer scale of full-grown dragons yet. To see them locked in mortal combat overwhelmed him. For days afterward, Onin suppressed shaking in his hands.
Feral dragons were unsettling on a primal level and haunted his nightmares. Onin experienced his recurring dream again but with differences. Battling dragons filled the sky. Ferals attacked and slaughtered another kind of dragon, one Onin didn’t recognize. They weren’t verdants. He could tell by the shape alone. These new dragons had only two legs and wings, with serpentine bodies, like the ferals, instead of four legs and a thick torso like the verdants. The new dragons were the same general size as the ferals too. They were in bright, sparkling colors, contrasting the blacks and grays of the ferals. In the dream, ferals battled these majestic dragons until none remained. The landscape was littered with fallen, crumpled bodies.
The eggs remained the same. The dream shifted focus until the mound of eggs predominated, and the foremost egg, with the many striations, came to be the center of his vision. The striations he now knew to be a mark of poor health in an egg, but the shieldlike shape formed by the gray patches glowed with a life of its own. This was new; the symbol had never glowed so distinctly in previous dreams.
The amber-colored glow became stronger, until Onin could no longer see for the brightness of it. Finally a different scene, a different place came into view as the light dimmed. It was a baby, floating down a river on a bed of reeds resembling the shape on the eggshell.
* * *
"I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS," Onin said. He scanned the letter in his hands again. "Two weeks and no sign of him? A man doesn’t just disappear into thin air."
Yolan popped a grape into her mouth. The night was pleasantly cool, and the gentle breeze, refreshing.
"I agree," she said. "He must be somewhere; you just can’t find him."
He found her flippant, matter-of-fact tone irritating but bit back a rude response. He had just returned home and didn’t want things to turn sour between them so soon.
"True," he said. "But we’re running out of places to look. He hasn’t been seen at home, hasn’t reported for duty, and hasn’t been to his usual taverns or haunts. He hasn’t been seen by anyone in his neighborhood since the day he went missing. His wife is beside herself."
"Yes, poor thing," said his wife while eating another grape. "Rabbash is clever; you’ve said so yourself. Maybe you should just trust that he’ll turn up."
"Not sure I have any alternative," muttered Onin, but Yolan perked up.
"Oh, come now," said Yolan in a musical tone. "You have just returned and shouldn’t worry yourself over such bad tidings. Take some time to recuperate first."
Onin sighed. Perhaps she was right. "How is the clutch doing?" he asked, hoping to change subjects to a brighter note.
"Not well, I’m afraid," she replied, dashing his hopes. "The master incubator reports the clutch has gone bad."
"Bad?" Onin exclaimed. "All of them? The entire clutch?" His disappointment ran deep. Almost all of his free time was spent at the hatchery. He knew the striations of color were a warning sign, but they had progressed farther than he thought possible in his absence. He hung his head.
"There, my husband," she soothed him, stroking the back of his head, her touch soft and inviting. "We recouped our losses by selling the remains. There is also good news, so do not brood so."
He looked up into her face, wondering what could possibly assuage the dark feelings he was experiencing. His missing friend, the lost clutch of eggs, and the death of the grounded verdant left him in a bleak frame of mind. She took his face in her hands and smiled at him.
“A new clutch was dropped this morning.” She smiled. “You can return to nursing eggs immediately. Who knows? You might even hatch a dragon.”