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 their shapes could sometimes be discerned as a darkening of the stars, but it was a darkening that said dragon only to those who looked very intently and patiently. What’s more, a dragon’s 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