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 had expected, had proven extraordinarily strong. It was a large animal, and would have been beautiful were it not that its pelt was matted with blood and mud and dirt. Perhaps the arrow had opened an artery. Fletcher raised the carcass slowly and turned it over to inspect the damage the arrow had made in the pelt. The shaft of the arrow was broken, but he would recover the tip later when he skinned it. The pelt would go to the sheriff. He would give the rest of the carcass to Aelric for the hound.
“John, look here,” said Aelric. He pointed to the wolf’s throat, which had been cleanly sliced through with a knife. “I thought you said you put an arrow in it.”
Fletcher indicated the broken shaft in the animal’s shank. “Somebody else did that.”
“A poacher in the king’s forest!” Aelric gave a low whistle.
“A poacher would’ve taken the carcass,” said Fletcher flatly. He ran his hand along the animal’s back, stiff now in death.
“Why cut its throat but leave the pelt behind?”
“He didn’t come to take the wolf, only to kill it. Probably a farmer who’d lost too many chickens.” But maybe Elspeth had done this, which was more disturbing.
“Why not skin it anyway?” asked Aelric. “It’s a pretty thing.” He glanced at the hound, then ran his fingers through the wolf’s thick fur.
“And be caught in the act or later with the evidence in his hands?” Fletcher said. “Maybe he heard someone coming.” He let out a low whistle. “Look here at its belly. This wolf had pups.” As he talked he cleaned off the carcass as best he could and slung it up on the horse behind the saddle. With a rope he tied it to a pair of iron rings that hung behind the saddlebags.
“Home now?” asked Aelric.
“Not yet. While we got the hound we’ve got to find the lair and kill the pups. And a mother wolf means a father wolf. Let’s hope we find him, or else we’ll be hunting again tomorrow.”
They found the wolf’s lair on the edge of a small glen, near the ruins of a Roman wall, not far from the rise where she had taken the arrow. When the wolf had led him down river she had taken them away from her lair, a mother’s instinctive movement even in dying to protect her young. It was a beautiful and sacrificial thing, something he admired in the animal even as he realized that its blood was on his own hands. He caught an image of a squalling, bloody baby Alysse had left him.
Footprints leading up to the lair told him someone had been here, too. The opening had been widened by a solid, stomping kick. Had Elspeth done that? She did not seem heavy enough, but then again, she was a tough girl who often did things that surprised him.
Within the lair, deep back, he found a single pup. What that meant was hard to tell. Had there been other pups? Had Elspeth taken them? Why? What had she done with them? And why leave this one? Perhaps she had decided to scatter the litter, hoping to give them a better chance of survival, and had simply missed this one. Either way, without a mother it was likely to starve. That was the way of the forest. Some creatures live, some die.
Despite himself Fletcher rankled at that. A pup without a mother was evidence enough that there was something wrong with the world. Should he leave this tiny creature at the mercy of the elements? It would soon enough be a meal for some forest creature, and if not that, then it would starve. And if it survived somehow, he and Aelric would be back hunting it as a mature animal, only later in the year, maybe in winter when the natural game in the forest would grow scarce and like its mother it would make its way out of the forest to fill its belly with chickens and farm animals.
He withdrew his hunting knife from its sheath, and then paused for a moment, aware of the pup’s tiny head and its soft fur against the rough calluses of his palms and fingers, and in his mind’s eye