Meghan's Dragon (7 page)

Chapter 16

After polishing off a whole chicken by himself, along with three baked potatoes, a family-sized plate of green beans, and a pitcher of hard apple cider, Bryan felt satiated for the first time since he discovered the joys of fire making. Even though he had made good progress with levitation before they reached the inn, the fact that his magic instructor was paying for the lunch made the meal even tastier.

Meghan barely made it through a serving of hearty soup, despite the fact that she thought she had never been so hungry when they sat down. Bryan’s progress at magic in less than a day was truly astounding, and she suspected he might have equaled her own ability in levitation if she hadn’t broken off the lessons every time other people appeared on the road. Her fear was that a stranger might make a playful grab for the gold ring, triggering a deadly reaction from her student.

During the years she had spent searching for a dragon, Meghan had always imagined a loyal companion who could transform into a creature with a mouth full of frightening teeth and stand between her and danger. She was starting to realize that the legends and popular woodblock prints of girls riding dragons in flight may not have told the whole story. Bryan clearly had a mind of his own and would act according to his own wishes, and that was beginning to scare her. Meghan wondered if her time would have been better spent training a large dog.

“Are you not talking to me because of the bird thing?” Bryan demanded. He sensed a change in Meghan, a drawing away, and he decided that he didn’t like it.

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don’t know.” Meghan exhaled sharply and mentally berated herself for sounding like a child. “Crows eat crops, though they eat the insects that damage crops as well, so the farmers around the castle mainly leave them alone. It was how you killed it without a thought, like brushing away a fly.”

“Sorry,” Bryan said, but the simultaneous shrug made it clear that he was only sorry she was unhappy, not that he had roasted the crow. “I’ve been listening in for a while on those guys at the table in the corner and they talked about taking a shortcut to Castle Foregone. One of them said it cuts a day off of the trip, plus there aren’t many people.”

Meghan put a finger to her lips and shushed him, looking towards the corner at the same time to see if the well-armed trio had overheard Bryan’s recitation of their private conversation.

“You can hear what those guys are saying?” she whispered.

“Sure. The one they call Dagger is telling the other two about the time—uh, I don’t think you want to know,” Bryan concluded awkwardly.

“They’re bandits,” she hissed at him. “No, don’t look over there. I’m not interested in a shortcut that has men like them traveling it, and you realize that leaving the road means no inns or settlements to buy food.”

“Forget that!” Bryan exclaimed. “Hey, since you’re buying lunch, how about asking if they’ll sell us a couple of chickens to go?”

“You’re impossible,” Meghan retorted, though his obsession with food was sort of endearing. “Uh, oh. I think those bandits are looking at us now. It was a mistake getting your clothes fixed for you. We should have just bought you something new.”

“What’s wrong with blue jeans and a white T-shirt?”

“Nobody else wears anything similar if you haven’t noticed. It may lead some people to assume you’re from a rich family, since they’re the only ones who can afford to spend money on clothes for the sake of looking different. Oh, crumbs. They’re heading over here, so let me do the talking.”

Three tough-looking men with iron spurs strapped to their boots approached the young couple’s table. Two of them rested axes on their shoulders, and the third carried a short sword by the scabbard in his left hand.

“My friends and I noticed that the two of you kept looking our way,” drawled the bandit with the sword. An ugly scar ran from corner of his mouth up to his left eye, as if he had tried eating something on the tip of a knife while drunk and missed badly. “The only explanation we could come up with for your interest is that you wanted to treat us to lunch.”

“Dream on,” Bryan growled, ignoring Meghan’s frantic gestures and rising to his feet. He was a fist taller than the scarred leader, and somehow he seemed to loom over all three of the older men, even with the table between them. He lazily stretched his hands above his head, causing his vertebrae to crack loudly, and a subtle red glow danced around his fingertips.

“Watch it, Dagger. That one’s packing heavy magic,” said the man to the leader’s right. He spat ostentatiously on the floor.

“They’re kids,” Dagger snorted, moving his free hand deliberately to the hilt of his sword.

“He’ll burn you before you draw,” the sideman stated flatly, backing towards the door to be out of the line of fire. “You know my talent is measuring what people have inside, but even you should be able to see it in his eyes.”

Meghan risked a glance away from the bandits and saw immediately what the man was talking about. Little flames sparked in her companion’s green eyes, as if they were just waiting for an excuse to get free and burn something. She shuddered involuntarily, and then forced herself to speak.

“Please, just leave,” she said, reaching for the talisman hanging around her neck. Meghan wasn’t sure what she would do if the highwayman drew his sword, but she knew if she didn’t come up with something, Bryan might accidentally send the whole place up in flames.

Dagger didn’t like what he saw in the younger man’s eyes any more than Meghan did, and he turned suddenly and strode out the door. Bryan waited until the three men were outside before he sat down with a lazy grin.

“I told you to let me handle it,” Meghan reproached him, though she found herself strangely drawn to his aggressive attitude at the same time.

“How many fights have you been in?” he asked her offhandedly.

“What?”

“You heard me. How many fights have you been in?”

“None,” she said. “And I want to keep it that way.”

“I took my share of bullying,” Bryan told her, ignoring the latter part of her response. “Every couple of years in school I’d have to fight some guy to keep from getting picked on. I’m not saying that I ever intimidated anybody, but I know how to stand up. And whatever you think, I had those guys beat.”

“You would have killed them and burned down the inn!”

“Yes to the first, maybe to the second.” Bryan reached across the table and took one of Meghan’s hands in his, and she noticed for the first time that she was trembling. “Are you sure you’re up for this adventure? I’ll admit I don’t have a clue where we’re going or what’s going to happen to us, but I’ve played enough fantasy games to imagine I have a better grip on what we’re headed into than you do. Your friend Phinneas didn’t get his scars eating prickly fruits, and he wasn’t training those guys with wooden swords to be chefs.”

“Aren’t you afraid of anything?” Meghan asked softly.

“I used to be afraid of almost everything. Then I died and you brought me here. Now I’m, I don’t know, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let anybody push me around or take my treasure.”

He released her hand and sat back, looking rather pleased with himself.

“I’ll talk to the cook and see if I can get a chicken to go,” Meghan said.

Chapter 17

By the time they stopped for supper, Bryan could bring the falling gold ring to a dead stop in the air. He could also make it come to him, though he found himself more and more reluctant to hand it back to Meghan each time he touched it. There was just something about gold.

“We’re making good time, and it would be nice to sleep in a bed tonight,” Meghan hinted after their picnic meal was finished. “It will be dark in a couple of hours, so maybe we should stop at the next inn or settlement to ask.”

“Bad strategy,” Bryan replied, wiping his hands on his T-shirt. He couldn’t get over the fact that the grease came off of his fingers, but rather than staining the cloth, it balled up and fell to the ground like tiny beads of water rolling off a waterproofed poncho. He wondered if there was a magical landfill somewhere overflowing with the stuff people wiped off on their shirts and pants.

“How is sleeping in a bed a bad strategy?”

“If somebody from your castle is trying to chase us down on horseback, they’re sure to stop at every place we could take shelter. You already have us diving in the bushes every time I hear horses coming.”

“But nobody will ride at night.”

“They might if they want you badly enough,” Bryan said. “Besides, the last inn we passed had their prices posted on the hanging slate, and it was five coppers to share a bed.”

“Share?” Meghan couldn’t believe she had momentarily forgotten all of the stories about sharing beds with strangers on the road. Only the wealthy could afford rooms and beds to themselves. “Maybe you’re right.”

“That’s ten coppers for the two of us,” he continued, not noticing her discomfort with the concept of sleeping with strangers. “Ten coppers would buy five bowls of porridge, or two loaves of bread, or one roasted chicken. How many coppers are there in a silver again?”

“Ten in the small silver, twenty five in the big silver, though if you’re buying from one of the tradesmen in the castle, they usually weigh them to catch the shaved coins. Out in the countryside, people will just refuse a coin if it looks light.”

“All I’m saying is that inns are dangerous and a waste of money. It’s not even that cold out at night.”

“It will be by the next full moon,” Meghan told him. “Don’t forget we added an extra month at the spring equinox so it’s actually later in the season than Ninth.”

“What’s Ninth?”

“You don’t count the months of the year where you come from? How can the farmers know when to plant seeds or the soldiers know when to go to war?”

“We have names for the months, and our soldiers fight year-round. What kind of a dumb name for a month is Ninth?”

“It’s a smart name for the month after Eighth and before Tenth,” she retorted. “All I’m saying is that there was a double Fourth this year, so everything is later than it seems.”

“Hey, you stole my expression!”

“What?”

“All I’m saying. I’m the only person here who uses that.”

“Oh brother,” Meghan muttered. “You’re the weirdest cross between a grown man and a little boy I’ve ever met.”

“Anyway, if you have to add months, that means you’re using a lunar calendar, and it will still go off track whatever you do.”

“For your information, I studied calendars with Hadrixia and they all go off track. In addition to the extra months, we add a day every couple hundred years. It has to do with how fast the sun is going around the Earth.”

“What!” Bryan stared at the girl in disbelief. “You think that the sun goes around the Earth? Do you also think that if we walk far enough we can fall off the edge because the Earth is flat?”

“Who thinks the Earth is flat? That’s just stupid. But I can see with my own eyes that the sun goes around us every day.”

“I forgot you’ve never been to school,” Bryan said. “Earth spins on its axis as it goes around the sun. That’s where days come from.”

“So why doesn’t the moon spin when it goes around us?” she asked triumphantly. “You can always see the same face on it when it’s full.”

“Let’s get going,” Bryan said, suddenly tiring of the argument. If she wanted to believe that the sun went around the Earth, what difference did it make? “We agreed on not blowing any money sleeping at inns. Right?”

Chapter 18

An owl hooted its displeasure as the humans set up camp below the towering, old-growth trees. The diameter of the fallen red oak was higher than Meghan’s shoulders, and it shielded their tents effectively from the view of any passersby on the road. The forest floor was rich with fallen chestnuts, acorns, and hickory nuts, and the tenants of the hollowed-out red oak—chipmunks, mice, squirrels, and even the occasional baby raccoon—were viewed by the great horned owl as fast food.

“I can’t get over how big these trees are,” Bryan said for at least the third time since they had moved beyond the settled river valley area. “Haven’t you people ever heard of lumber companies?”

“The wood from just one of these trees would be enough to build a half a dozen houses,” Meghan told him. “Hadrixia once took me to watch the sawyers cutting up the trunk of an old tree that came down the river after a storm. It took them all week, and when they were done, there was enough wood to keep the carpenters busy building all winter.”

“We used to have forests like this on Dark Earth, but other than a few parks, they’ve long since been cut down. Even when the trees grow back, it’s not the same because the natural rhythm has changed.”

“There are barely enough people in New Land to occasionally clear a new field, much less cut down a whole forest. I don’t think our landmasses can be any different than those on Dark Earth just six thousand years after your world was exiled to its own place. If you recognize all of the trees and animals, you must have come from somewhere around here.”

“Maybe within a month’s walking on decent trails. Hey, that’s not what I meant to say. Is there some reason Hadrixia didn’t teach me units of measure? Every time I want to explain a distance, it comes out like I’m talking about taking a trip.”

“That is how we measure long distances,” Meghan replied. “Soldiers use marching or riding days, and I’ve heard that people who go to sea have a completely different system. When would you ever need to talk about distances without wanting to know how long it takes to get there?”

“Well, say I wanted to cut down one of these trees and float it to whatever castle controls the mouth of the river. I might ask you how far it is to the castle so I could divide that by the distance my tree can float in a day and figure how long it would take to get there.”

“But if we were people who cut down trees and floated them on rivers, we’d know that. You’d ask me how far it is to some castle and I’d tell you how many tree-floating days it is.”

“You mean that everybody in the different trades uses different measures to talk to each other?”

“Of course,” Meghan replied. “That’s part of learning a trade. Do you need to know how many fingers your waist is so you can order a dress?” She burst out laughing at the mental picture of Bryan in skirts.

“But how can you build anything to plans or make new parts for stuff if everybody in one castle measures boards in lengths of Uncle Joe’s forearm, and everybody—no, half the people in another castle measure boards in lengths of Aunt Sally’s leg?”

“Now you’re being silly on purpose. Why would people in one castle need to know how people in another castle measure boards?”

“It’s like, you’re pre-industrial,” Bryan exploded in frustration. “How about map making? How can you tell how far apart the land masses are if you don’t have a scale?”

“You mean like the distance between New Land and Old Land? Even with a mage onboard a ship to ensure a steady wind, there are too many variables to give the distance with any precision. A storm could come along and delay passage for days or even blow the ship entirely off course. And supposedly there are rivers in the oceans that affect the journey as well.”

“Currents,” Bryan supplied the better word. “But you’re proving my point exactly. If everybody knew that from point A on the coast of New Land to point B on the coast of Old Land was a hundred days walking—I hate this language.”

“Why would anybody want to know how long it takes to walk across an ocean?” Meghan asked, not understanding the source of Bryan’s frustration. “I suppose a mage with the right talents could do it, but it doesn’t seem like very useful information.”

“I give up,” Bryan said. “Do you have any of that pie left?”