mime might trick the eyes, but not the nose or the ears. They give off a distinctive odor—hard like tar. They leave footprints. And then there is the bellowing, but even that was a kind of camouflage. The bellowing of dragons is often taken for thunder.
Sometimes when the wind shifted Fletcher smelled the hard, acrid smell of tar and knew that somewhere nearby there was a dragon, no-doubt standing stock still but tracking their movements with its eyes. In the old days while he had still been indentured to the bookbinder, Fletcher had known of a small roil of dragons that nested in a cave near the village, but he had said nothing to the authorities because the creatures held a peculiar fascination for him. Something terrible can also be beautiful.
The bookbinder’s dragon had grown larger as Fletcher and Levente had grown larger, all of them kept in the same house, all kept against their wills by a demanding and angry taskmaster.
“Know anything about dragons, Aelric?” asked Fletcher, breaking the silence only when they were well away from the town.
Aelric laughed again, that same high-pitched nervous way John found annoying and revealing at the same time. “Dragons, John?” he said. His eyes shifted quickly from side to side and his body dropped a little closer to the saddle and the protecting bulk of the horse. “There ain’t no dragons. Not now, if there ever was any.” He glanced behind himself and then stared at the dog, which had frozen in position, pointing at a small outcropping of rock that loomed from a bluff that had appeared on the left, casting a long morning shadow onto the trail ahead of them. “Back,” he said to the dog. The animal let out a low rumble, then returned to its place on the trail. The hair remained raised on its back.
“Don’t believe in them then?” said Fletcher. Aelric had stopped to let his horse piss, and Fletcher had to twist around in the saddle to be heard.
“Never seen one, that’s all,” said Aelric, catching up. “Got no time for some creature I never seen. Don’t want to see one, not in my lifetime.”
They rode more deeply into the shadow of the bluff. Aelric looked back in the direction of the outcropping, but with the change of perspective it had disappeared from view.
“Maybe you’re not looking in the right places,” said Fletcher.
“No such thing as a right place. Why would I look for a dragon? They’re dangerous.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “I’m not saying I believe in them though.”
“Dangerous, but oh so beautiful,” said Fletcher. The bookbinder’s dragon had been a marvel. “Dragons are weird beautiful, like something you’d see in a dream. Nothing else like them. Nowhere.”
“Beautiful and dangerous then, but neither if they’re made up out of some storyteller’s head.” Fletcher noticed that Aelric drew his mount a little closer to his own, and kept darting his eyes across the countryside.
Fletcher thought about the time he had been burned. He might have been ten. Maybe eleven. At the time, the dragon was the size of a small cat, but it was more lizard-like, with layers of fine scales that reminded him of the trout he sometimes caught in the river. The scales were iridescent silver, and so fine he imagined the animal’s hide might feel smooth to the touch. It could have been a lizard, except for the talons and the wings—and the fact that it could disappear. The wings were disproportionately large, so that they almost looked comical. They were locked into the pronounced and protruding bones of its shoulder blades. The bookbinder kept the dragon in a cage, but when he let it out for exercise, it had to struggle to maintain its balance against the weight and distended length of the wings. Its belly was low to the ground, so that as it made its way across the floor of the bindery, it swayed from side to side, and sometimes even fell over, and as a young boy Fletcher had felt a kind of sympathy for it, and after a while even something like affection.
When he brought it morsels of bread from his dinner-plate, the dragon had made a cooing, clucking sound like a hen might make, or it would purr like a cat, the rumble coming up from deep within its belly.
But once, as he fed it, the dragon had responded to his outstretched hand with a blast from its nostril-flame, which was how Fletcher discovered that an animal can be both dangerous and beautiful at the same time, that something beautiful isn’t automatically safe or good. When he had reported this event to the bookbinder, the man had blamed him rather than the animal. “That can happen,” he had said. “Watch yourself around my dragon.”
“I got burned by a dragon once. When I was a boy,” said Fletcher simply.
Aelric turned in his saddle and looked at him, hard, then snorted: “You seen dragons, have you!” As he said this he rested his hand on the butt of the crossbow he had brought in his saddlebag. The trail led closer to the bluff.
“They’ve got this weird way of disappearing,” Fletcher insisted. “Like lizards and horny-toads. And snakes. A snake holds perfectly still against a flat rock, it disappears. Dragons do that, too.”
Just then a flock of grouse shot up from the brush beside the path in front of them. They had held so still and the coloring of their feathers had blended so perfectly with the bushes that the hunting party might have passed them by completely if the hound had not caught their scent and run out to rout them from their nest. Fletcher said nothing. What more needed to be said?
Levente, who was older, had challenged the bookbinder about the danger. “It burned John,” he said. “It could burn one of the farm animals, or even a child. What if it burned somebody else, maybe worse than it burned John?”
The man had been unmoved. “A dragon’s no more to blame for that than a wolf is to blame for eating sheep. It’s their nature.”
“We don’t keep wolves as pets,” Levente said. “And we don’t let wolves run freely through the countryside, eating people’s farm animals. We hunt them down and kill them.”
“That we do,” the bookbinder had said to him, “but if we kill them all, the farms get overrun with rodents. Even wolves have their place in God’s creation. But I haven’t let my dragon run free now, have I?”
“But somebody could get hurt,” Levente protested, but Fletcher knew the protestations would have no effect on his father.
“Would you give up the fire crackling in your hearth on a cold winter’s night just because somewhere, sometime, somebody else’s fire got out of hand and burned his house down?”
“But a person takes precautions.”
“Right,” said the bookbinder. He shook a sharp-pointed awl at Fletcher. “My point exactly. Mind yourself around my dragon.”
That he had done. Once, the dragon had broken its holding chain and escaped, only to be recaptured and returned by the bookbinder. Fletcher had felt sympathy for the animal then, and brought it food. It was too large to be confined in such a place as the bookbindery. It was a living thing, a marvel, as near to perfect as any creature Fletcher had ever seen, before or after, but terrifying and mysterious nonetheless. By then he had realized that he was held captive in the same way as the dragon—the bookbinder was a hard man—and he wanted freedom for himself and the dragon both. In an odd way, he identified with it.
Fletcher and Aelric rode in silence after that. Fletcher was not afraid of dragons, not for himself, but he did worry about the girl.
With the hound it took no time at all to locate the carcass of the wolf. It had made its way farther downriver than he
