She started supper, chopping the ingredients for a thick gruel and setting them on the pot to boil. Still she waited. Still no sign. From time to time she returned to the pot to stir the gruel so it wouldn’t burn on the bottom. She was stirring the pot when she heard the sound of voices on the cart path outside. Willem. Sarabeth. Her father. Willem’s voice and Sarabeth’s were clear and distinct—she would have recognized them anywhere—but the voice of her father was muted and slurred and it took a moment for her to realize who it was. She thought at first that her father must be sick, and she had the door open before they arrived, and had pulled a chair back from the table and thrown back the covers of the canopy bed in case they needed that instead.
Her father was muttering something about “idiot priest” and “phurgatory” and “‘Lysse,” all of which told Elspeth nothing at all except that the man was not sick, but drunk. Very drunk.
“I have him now,” she said to Sarabeth and Willem. “I’ll see his bar bill is paid in the morning.”
The three of them moved Fletcher to the bed and Elspeth pulled off his shoes and lifted his legs up onto the bed. Fletcher was sweating heavily now, and Elspeth was aware that he might be sick. She turned to look for a bowl. When she turned back, Willem and Sarabeth were closing the door behind them. She heard something that sounded reassuring—not to worry about the bill, all would be well—but was called back to the bed by the sound of her father retching into the bowl.
Then she heard sputtering at the fire. She turned back quickly to see that the gruel had boiled over and was spilling out in sporadic bursts and pops, threatening to douse the flame. Elspeth grabbed at the pot handle to stop the spilling and more importantly to salvage what she could of the gruel. It was a quick unplanned urgent gesture, and in her hurry she neglected to pad her hand against the heat. The searing pain of the burn was instantaneous; she later discovered that it had left a long red welt across three of her fingers and a part of her palm. She jerked back, upsetting the tripod that held the pot over the fire, falling backward against a chair. The gruel spilled out onto the floor, making a large steaming mass across both the floor and her dress, giving her another shot of pain, this one less intense but distributed over a wide area on her left leg. Worse, she twisted the leg as she fell.
Her father was upon her then, lunging at her, stepping into the steaming gruel, his fists flailing. Elspeth tried to get to her feet, but the twisted leg did not support her weight. Her father brought a chair down hard across her back. The chair splintered into six or seven large pieces, all of them sent flying or sliding across the floor. He slipped and came down hard on his right knee in the steaming mass.
Then it was over. The gruel, thinning as it spread, had cooled very quickly into a terrible but harmless mess. Her father, sick from the pain and the alcohol managed only to raise himself enough to fall backward onto the bed. Elspeth stumbled outside, and for a while sat spread-eagled by the door catching her breath and trying to think through what she should do next. Then, when the searing pain again demanded her attention, she struggled up and stumbled to the well, where with her unburned left hand she drew up a bucket of cool, clear, healing water.
She went and sat down in the lean-to, pulled wheat sacks around herself for warmth, and waited for either sleep or morning, whichever might come first, to provide relief from her confusion and fear.
It was in one of those fitful, intermittent periods of sleep that she found herself disturbed by the excited cackling of the hens, themselves disturbed by something on the roof. She was sure she was dreaming, but even in her sleep when she held her breath and listened carefully she caught the barely audible sound of a presence, and then a heavy movement above that started on the roof and ended near the chicken coop. She thought at first that a sudden gust of wind might have rustled the leaves in the trees beyond the fence, but the trees closer to the house were absolutely still, and she could see by the light of the half-moon that the movement in the yard was different than wind—closer to the ground, steadier, more substantial. A low growl anchored her attention around the side corner of the house.
In her dream she pulled in her arms and legs, frantically scrambling to hide herself behind the wheat sacks, and then when she had her head covered too she watched out of the triangular opening of the lean-to.
The creature was in the barnyard this time, moving across the tight space where the pathway came close to the corner of the hut. Its tail was stretched out and its spines raised, the way a porcupine might raise its quills when it felt threatened. It had grown. The wings were a better fit to its body now, and she had the impression that it could probably fly. Its eyes flashed, and another low rumble welled up within its throat. The rumble was short and raspy, the sort of sound that would have developed into a roar had the creature been larger and more mature. To Elspeth the rumble was enough. The fear was the same, and it was there from the moment that the dream began. This time the curiosity was gone, and the fear presented itself as her only emotion, intensified and made concrete by the throbbing welt on her hand and the scalded skin on her leg. The creature was something from a nightmare, and the fear gripped the girl instantly.
She rubbed the ache in her back where the chair had hit. Almost reflexively she reached for a metal rod that was leaning against the corner of the hut, not really knowing if such a weapon would be of any use against a creature like this one, but realizing also that doing something was better than simply waiting for the animal to attack. As she did so, a blast of flame shot from the creature’s nostrils. She threw the rod. She had not been burned, but was now terrified. She turned suddenly, and scrambled for the space behind the stacks of supplies that were stored in the lean-to.
She cried out for her father like before, but this time she was aware that her father, drunk and sick in the hut, would not come to her aid. The cry, oddly, seemed to be enough for the moment. The creature retreated. There was a long silence, punctuated in the distance by the barking of a dog.
When she woke up she tried to recall the dream. It had all seemed so real, as real and vivid as the throbbing pain in her hand and leg. If her father had not told her that the creature was the stuff of dreaming, she would have staked her life on the fact that it was real. Whatever she might have thought about the reality of the dragon, she knew that the fear at least was real. She prayed for this nightmare to pass, and then, slowly, in what seemed like an answer to her prayer, she felt her spirit calm and her heart slow. Her mind moved to other things. She thought vaguely of the saying she had once heard at church—weeping endures for the night, but joy comes in the morning.
But the danger had passed and there was nothing more to be done. She nestled down deeper into the grain sacks and went back to sleep.
Fletcher’s head felt like it had been filled with cotton soaked in creosote, and then split open with an axe. He tried to spit, but his mouth was dry, and nothing came except for the flat acrid taste of tar. His knee throbbed, and below the knee there were scalded places where the skin had been burned. None of this made any sense to him, and he sat for a long time trying to clear his head.
He tried to reconstruct what had happened during the night. The hut was a shambles. One of the chairs was broken. The fire pit and the tripod had been overturned, and ashes were scattered across the floor. Mixed in with the ashes a mess of cold gruel had spread out on the floor in the shape of Warwickshire. The girl was gone.
Then slowly the story came back to him in broken, fragmented images, shattered images like a stained window he once saw in Warwick that had cracked and then shattered under the strain of a small earthquake. He had come home drunk. Must have stopped at The Pint and Ploughman, but there was no memory of coming home. The girl had spilled the gruel, and may have burned her hand. It was impossible to tell what had happened first. He seemed to recall saying something harsh to the girl, something about Alysse.
After that, the memory mired in a fog as thick as the spilled gruel.
When Elspeth woke again she was huddled into the farthest, deepest corner of the