be sick. She swallowed hard against that. She felt flushed and sweaty in her bedclothes.
Then there was a movement in the corner of her eye—a subtle, undulating movement in the thin sliver of moonlight that leaked in through a crack in the window. What was that? A tail? Did she see a tail? Or the outline of a tail? It was too large for a lizard. It slipped silently out of sight around the corner of her father’s canopy bed. There was an animal in the hut, and she knew instinctively that it was dangerous. She pulled the covers closer around her, and groped in the dark for a knife or something she might use as a club, but there was nothing at hand. She squinted into the dark corners of the hut to see if she could gain some sort of clue about what it was.
It had been the hard smell of tar that had awakened her; she now knew it for certain. What was it? How did it get in? Where was her father?
What she said next she said very quietly. “Father.” That was all, just the one word. Father.
He emerged from behind the canopy.
She said—again, very quietly—“There’s something in the hut.” If she closed her eyes she could see it again. She described it to her father—the smell of tar, the shimmering, the tail slipping around behind the bed. “It’s some kind of animal. It’s got a lizard’s tail, I think. No, it’s too big for that. Too big to be a lizard. I think it’s in the corner. On the other side of your bed.”
Her father stood up in the dark, moved quietly to the doorway to retrieve his crossbow. He could not load it there in the dark and instead hefted it above his head like a club. Then he moved to the bed, calmly pulling it around to expose the space between the bed and the wall.
Nothing.
The space was empty.
He opened the door to gather a little more moonlight, and then used his flint kit to light a small lamp. When he left the door open, she thought perhaps it was because a trapped animal is more dangerous than a free one. She thought about the pup in the box outside.
“Nothing, Els. There’s nothing there.” He held the lamp low and looked under the bed, waving his arm in the small space to show her there was nothing there. “Look for yourself. Nothing. No lizard, no creature. You’ve had a bad dream.”
A small breeze came in through the open door, chilling the sweat against her skin. “It was here. I know it was here. Right there, behind your bed.” She went, knelt, looked hard beneath the bed. Nothing. She took the lamp and made a careful inspection of the hut. Nothing. Beneath the two beds. Behind the table. Nothing.
“Go back to sleep, Els,” her father insisted. “There’s nothing here. You’re safe. You’ve just had a bad dream. Go back to sleep.”
It was a long time before she drifted back to sleep, and even wide awake she relived the dream. It had all seemed so very real, so vivid, as though she could reach out even then and touch the creature, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. She sat on her bed with her back to the wall and stared out the open window at the corner tower of the town, and wall of the monastery and the convent, all of it outlined against the sky by the glow of the moon. Even the fresh breeze that came in through the window could not clear from her memory the smell of tar that seemed to linger in the air like a stain.
❧
When Fletcher woke, his tongue tasted sour and dry and he thought for a moment that he had been chewing on lemon rind. His head throbbed in a kind of incessant marching beat. His woolen nightshirt clung to his body from the night sweats, and the sticky throbbing heat nagged at him, forcing its way past that fragile barrier between things remembered and things dreamt.
He had told the girl she had had a bad dream, something about a creature in the hut, but there was more to it than that. He should have known this moment would come. He had sensed something was disturbing in the girl. There was that defiance, that flash in the eye, that granite set of the girl’s jaw.
Fletcher knew more than he had told the girl. That was no dream. What she had described was a dragon. It might still be there; dragons could almost disappear at will. The defiance in the girl had drawn a dragon into the hut.
He wasn’t sure he wanted it gone. Not yet. He wanted to see it for himself first.
But the light had grown strong, and Fletcher forced himself to clear his head to get up. The wolf was waiting in the forest. He dressed and headed for the stockade, taking with him a hunk of the long-bread the girl had set out for his breakfast.
No sooner had Fletcher gone than Elspeth was on her feet. She dressed quickly, her fingers trembling in the morning cool. Before the sun was fully up she had quietly gathered the wolf pup from its box in the shed and returned it to the forest.
❧
At the foregate, the stable boy had already saddled his horse. Fletcher slipped the crossbow and a quarrel of bolts into one of the saddlebags, and in the other he put provisions for himself and Aelric, the handler for the dog. As he mounted, he took up a longbow in one hand and a quiver of arrows for his back.
Aelric rode a second horse. There would be time for walking when the hound had picked up the wolf’s scent.
“So John, what’s our quarry today? Two legs or four?”
“I put an arrow in a wolf last night near the north fork of the river.”
Aelric laughed, an insidious little laugh that made John want to spit. “The great John Fletcher didn’t take him out with his first shot?”
“Shut up, Aelric,” Fletcher said without looking at the man. He finished tying off his saddlebag, then mounted. “I put too much weight on a rotted log. The log broke just as I released the bowstring. I lost his trail when he took to the water. He can’t have gotten far. We’ll start where he went in. The hound can pick up his scent there.”
They rode in silence until they were beyond the foregate. Fletcher thought about the girl. He knew all too well what kind of creature the girl had seen. Fletcher himself had been burned by such a creature when he was a boy. The bookbinder had kept a small dragon the way some people keep snakes as pets because they are fascinated by the beauty of their scales or the sinuous way they moved.
The bookbinder’s dragon had held a similar fascination for Fletcher. Dragons are intelligent creatures; part of their nature is their ability to mimic other natural phenomena—a rock formation, a stand of trees, another animal. It was a state the bookbinder had called the “mime.” Or they shift colors to match their surroundings the way a chameleon changes colors, only dragons do so exquisitely, and by holding themselves stock still they can perfectly disappear. As he rode beside Aelric, Fletcher was fully aware that this outcropping of rock or that stand of short trees might well be a dragon, or even a roil of dragons, in a state of mime. When it was still a kit the bookbinder’s dragon had been known to mime cats and then dogs, and once when it was larger it mimed a small shed, so that few if any of the villagers had even known that it was there. In fact, few of the villagers had ever seen a dragon—more correctly, few were aware of having seen a dragon—and fewer still were courageous enough to believe they existed. To see one, you have to be looking for it, and you have to be willing to face the reality that something beautiful can also be terrible. People seldom look for creatures they’re afraid to believe exist.
But there was evidence of dragons even so—the mime had its limits. No living thing stays stock-still forever, and sooner or later even dragons have to breathe. When dragons flew overhead on a starry night
