Redheart (Leland Dragon Series) Read online

  “You need to drink,” Kallon said.

  “I know,” she said. “But I just want to sleep.”

  “First drink.” He stuck out the mug that dangled from his claw like a child’s toy. She sat up, and stared at it as though she’d never seen one before.

  “You don’t drink out of mugs. You don’t have tableware or cupboards or a pantry.” She blinked up at him. “Where did you get that one?”

  “Fine, don’t drink.” He set the mug on the ground.

  “Do you have human friends somewhere?”

  He snorted. “No friends. Anywhere.”

  “Then where did you find this mug? And where did you get that loaf of bread for me to eat?”

  He watched her through narrowed eyes. “Thought you said you wanted to sleep.”

  “How can you speak my language?” She gave a sharp look, and he thought he caught the glitter of emerald in her eyes. “And why did you help me? Why didn’t you just eat me or something?”

  Kallon curled his chin to his chest, eyes squeezing closed against her ceaseless questions. “I don’t eat humans.” Then his eyes popped open, and he thrust his snout near her face. “Could start though. You’re noisy.”

  She fell silent, and lifted the mug to her mouth. She stared up at him for several minutes before blurting, “Do you have a name?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course.”

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me what it is?”

  He tipped his head. He eyed her for a long time. He hadn’t planned on sharing his name with her, though now as he considered, it seemed safe enough. He himself hadn’t said it in so long he thought it might come bumbling off his tongue in a knot. “Kallon,” he finally said.

  “Kallon?”

  He winced. In her voice, his name sounded small and soft, and not at all flattering.

  “Just Kallon?” she asked.

  More questions. Every time he answered one, she bubbled out another like the mountain lake that gurgled incessant droplets, drip, drip, drip, into the darkest parts of his cave’s most secret place. He turned his gaze to the fading sun. “Just Kallon.”

  * * *

  In the night, Riza watched faces dance and jeer. Men’s hands tugged at her clothes. She tried to scream but had no voice, tried to fight them off but had no strength. She was blind and defenseless.

  Near her ear came a rumbled whisper. “What is wrong?”

  The voice jolted her with panic, but it snatched her from the grip of that place between waking and sleeping, where she’d been trapped. She sat up. “Kallon?”

  “Me,” he answered.

  She opened her eyes to see his jowls smack into a wide yawn. His lips peeled back from incisors as long as her fingers. His tongue flopped out. He gave a satisfied shudder, clamped his mouth shut, and threw his weight to roll onto his back. “Who’d you think?”

  She tried to breathe normally. Her heart was still racing from the dream she’d just had, and it didn’t help that she’d awakened to a mental image of being impaled on one of his teeth. She scooted away from him a few inches. “I had a dream,” she said. “I couldn’t wake up from it. That place is frightening.” She began breathing easier, and her wits were finally coming around. “I’m still in your cave, right?”

  Kallon answered a sleepy, “You are.”

  She nodded, remembering now. She rested back against the wall. She could feel the dragon’s body heat, and could hear the rumble of his breath in his chest. She felt oddly better for his company. “What time do you think it is?” she asked.

  Kallon slumped from his back to his side, legs thumping against the ground. “Don’t know,” he mumbled. He covered his eyes with his foreleg.

  “Midnight? Later? Earlier?”

  Kallon groaned. “Don’t know. Somewhere between high moon and dawn, perhaps.”

  She looked out through the cave but she couldn’t tell. Her headache had dulled to a throb, and she felt stronger. Her muscles were sore, but had stopped trembling. She lifted her arms in a tall stretch, testing them. “Because if it’s near dawn, I may just as well get up.”

  Kallon’s paw dropped from his eyes, and he raised his head. “Then get up. Or go back to sleep.”

  “Except that if dawn isn’t for a few hours, I’m not going out there in the dark. Not at least until dawn.”

  He peered down his snout at her. “Whatever your plans, do they require talking?”

  Riza winced, and drew her shoulders up to her ears. “Sorry.”

  He watched her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. Then he lay back down and let out a long breath against the dusty ground. His wings relaxed toward the floor.

  “It’s just that sometimes I wake up at night and can’t get back to sleep,” she explained.

  Kallon pulled up his head with a start and glared at the ceiling of the cave. “Going to keep talking, then?”

  “I can stop,” she said, and held up a hand. “If it’s bothering you.”

  He growled. He shifted his weight and crawled forward, and she watched his bulk bear down on her. “Talk,” he said, his nose inches from her own.

  She glanced away. “Oh. I—I suppose that was all I had to say.” She swallowed hard before looking back up at his face. To her surprise, he was smiling.

  “Do this a lot?”

  “Sometimes.” More often than she’d like to admit. Most times it happened, she would work on an unfinished rug she’d been braiding, or she’d sneak out to stroll along a tiny brook behind her father’s house. She liked to try to count the stars. “But I don’t want to go out there tonight,” she said.

  Kallon tipped his head. “Go where? To the frightening place?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “Said before you had a dream and couldn’t wake up. That it was a frightening place.”

  “Oh.” She nodded, remembering. “Yes, the place between waking and sleeping. Doesn’t that ever happen to you?”

  “Don’t think so. Don’t remember dreaming.”

  “It feels like a real place at the time. Like while I slept, my soul went wandering without me, and couldn’t get back. But that makes me sound crazy, doesn’t it?”

  Kallon’s brown eyes were warm on her face. “Not crazy.”

  She smiled. “Well, lots of people think I’m mad. You wouldn’t be the first.” She suddenly couldn’t help but laugh. “I can just imagine what they’d be saying if they saw me now, sitting in a cave in the middle of the night having a conversation with a dragon as though it was the most normal thing in the world.”

  He didn’t respond to that. His eyes probed, searching right through her to the wall behind. She shifted her weight.

  “Who thinks you’re mad?” he asked.

  “My father, for one.” That came out more quickly than she meant.

  “Why?”

  “Why does he think I’m mad?” When Kallon nodded, she shrugged. “Well, I suppose, because I didn’t want to marry a farmer and have a thousand babies, and live in the same village I’d always lived in.”

  “Didn’t know humans could have a thousand babies.”

  She smiled a little. “We can’t, really. I just mean that he wants me to have a lot of them, and be like everyone else, and think like everyone else.”

  “You don’t think like everyone else?”

  She considered that a moment. Her father had told her often enough that she didn’t think like a girl was supposed to think. She’d always wanted to ask him how a girl was supposed to think, but she’d already known what he’d say. What she really wanted to know was if other people had the same, rigid beliefs as her father.

  She’d shared an idea once with Isaak Hoag, the man her father wanted her to marry. As they’d walked beneath a dark sky that flickered with lights like tiny torches, she’d gazed up, and had forgotten her father’s warnings to keep her mouth shut. She’d wondered out loud. “What if the sky isn’t the end of our world, but just the beginning?” she’d aske
d. “What if someone on one of those far-away torches is looking back at us, wondering the same thing?” Isaak tugged her to a stop, and stared down with hard eyes. “Talk like that around here will get you a burnin’ platform to stand on.” It hadn’t been the first time she’d heard that threat, but she’d vowed it would be the last. That had been the very night she’d begun plans to leave and never go back.

  “You don’t think like everyone else?” the dragon asked again.

  “I don’t think like my father, or like Isaak Hoag,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder about my mother. She died before I ever had a chance to know her, but somehow, I think she used to feel crazy, like me.” She almost added something, but changed her mind.

  “What?” The dragon nudged her shoulder with his snout.

  “Well.” Very quietly, hesitantly, she said, “I think sometimes that my mother wanted to leave, too, but just couldn’t bring herself to do it. I think, maybe, she did the next bravest thing she could manage. She just closed her eyes, and died.”

  Riza could feel the heavy weight of his gaze now as it pressed her back against the wall, slowly crushing her. He was quiet for a long time, until he finally said, “That is a lot of thinking.”

  More silence lingered between them, until his eyes shifted away, and the weight of them disappeared. She breathed in relief. “How long have you lived here alone?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. Since I was young.”

  “Why do you stay here?”

  His head slung to the ground, and his breath stirred a tiny windstorm. “My territory.”

  “Don’t you ever get lonely?”

  His head jerked up and his eyes took on the look of Isaak Hoag. “My territory. It was my father’s, and his father’s. Don’t see how it matters to you, human.”

  She silenced herself with her hand over her mouth. Then she poked her finger into the dirt floor, and doodled a lopsided circle. “So you’ll pass on this territory to your son when you have one?”

  His eyes turned downright cold. “Won’t have a son. I’m the last Red.”

  She was instantly sorry she’d asked. She never meant to, but she always asked just one too many questions. She huddled against the cave wall and hugged her knees to her chest.

  Kallon swung his head to stare out into the sky. Darkness was unraveling, sliced by horizontal, purple ribbons. She watched his eyes reflect this sparkle. Then, without her even asking, he spoke. “Long ago, dragon territory was the whole earth. Used to be more lines than now.” He blinked slowly, and turned to her. “Mine isn’t the first to die out, and won’t be the last. You humans will see to that.”

  “Why don’t you fight back?”

  “Fighting. All you humans know.” He nodded his head toward her cheek, and she touched the tender place where she felt bruised. “You prey on one another, use violence to feel powerful. It’s beyond you to understand not every creature thinks the way you do.”

  “You don’t think like everyone else?” Riza asked, and smiled.

  He only swung his gaze back to the mouth of the cave. Once more, his eyes reflected the sun that was now a glowing half-nugget of gold against the horizon. The wash of color filled the cave, and the songs of early birds filtered cheerfully into the dusty air around them. “Sun is up. Safe for you to go,” he said, his voice flat.

  She didn’t know what she’d said that made him want to send her away, but she affected a lot of people that way. She slowly pushed to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she meant it.

  When her dizziness passed, she took a step toward the outside. “I think I will be fine now.” She watched him, waited for him to respond. Or nod. Anything. But he only stared into the sky. “Riza,” she whispered. “That’s my name, in case you were wondering.”

  He must not have been wondering, because he didn’t react. So she kept moving. Each step became stronger than the last. She reached the outside, and breathed deeply of the sweet morning light, drenched with dew. She gave a last glance over her shoulder to the dragon, who seemed no more than a statue. Then she lifted her chin, and faced the new day by walking directly into it.

  Chapter Six

  Riza wasn’t sure how long she’d walked before she finally stopped to rest. She leaned against the scratchy bark of a willow trunk and slid to her bottom. Where was she going, anyway? She looked up at the blistering morning sun. Rays stabbed like flames through the naked arms of pin oaks and knobby ash trees, and raised tears to her weary eyes. She was forced to look away.

  Before she was taken to the dragon’s cave, she’d been traveling south. With a few saved coins in her pouch, a sack of dried meat and bread, and her father’s knife, she’d headed out before dawn woke the village. She’d offered no goodbye to her father, no note, no explanation. No explanation would have been good enough, anyway.

  She’d spent several days walking and several eerie nights alone, surrounded by the sound of wildlife that seemed more ominous than she’d remembered it sounding when she was home, safe in her bed. But she had begun to grow accustomed, if only a little, to the sounds of nature all around her. It had helped remind her she wasn’t completely alone.

  She felt alone now, though. She was in far worse shape. She had no knife, no provisions, and no money at all. Perhaps she’d been hasty in leaving the dragon’s cave, despite the overpowering stench. She hadn’t even asked directions.

  What she needed was a plan. She looked back from where she came, recognizing the gradual up-slope of the dry earth. Rubble and stone lay like a trail of crumbs for her to find her way back to the cave, if she needed. After all, the dragon had helped her once, and finding him again would be better than starving to death.

  She looked forward. The earth continued downhill, until it flattened out around a patch of sapling pin oaks with branches too gnarled for trees so young. This forest was as thirsty and pitiful as the forest of her home village. But, growing saplings meant there was water somewhere. She pushed to her feet, determined to find the water before dark.

  Her battered boots rubbed and pinched. Perspiration tickled like crawling spiders down her back. She tried to twist her matted hair around her head, and even speared it several times with twigs to hold it, but it sagged and clung to her neck anyway.

  She searched on, and found herself circling paths she was sure she’d already seen. She veered toward promising low spots, but all she found were puddles of crunchy leaves. As the day wore on, her hungry stomach twisted angrily, and she felt as though she had a fat stick in her mouth where her tongue was supposed to be.

  And there was no water. Hours of searching left her legs trembling. Finally, they refused to move. She wanted to collapse, or at least sit, but she was too afraid she might not get back up again. She hugged a gray oak, instead.

  It was then she realized the sun was fading. An unfamiliar fear slithered across her skull and crept, whispering, into her ears. It was almost dark.

  She tried to think past the welling panic. She’d spent many a night in the forest before, and the darkness was a little unnerving sometimes, but nothing she’d ever been afraid of. There was nothing in the dark that wasn’t there in the daylight.

  Except now there was. Now the night held memories of monsters. Monsters with lecherous grins wet with saliva, and cold hands that gripped and pinched, and eyes, so many of them, that buzzed and hovered like black bees against a black wall and festered with death.

  “Stop it!” Riza shouted, and slapped her hands over her face. She had to stop thinking like that, and get moving again. She would just have to find the pebble trail back toward the cave, and beg another night’s stay with the dragon. It would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.

  But when she began moving again, she realized she’d lost the direction of the pebbles. A few steps this way, and a few that way only led her back to the same gray oak. She followed an upward tilt of the land, but it leveled out again. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where the dragon was.

 
Were the trees getting thicker as the light got smaller? She spun around, searching for an opening. She eased between two thick trunks, and, just as she was about to give in to her panic, a wide path rose up and parted the trees. She threw herself toward it and ran.

  She came to a stop in a small field. She could see the dark outline of a lumpy house in the near distance, with windows ablaze with torchlight. The sight calmed her, and she took a minute to catch her breath.

  Porkers grunted close by. She followed the sound. They were nosing the dirt of their sty, ignoring her, and weren’t even using the box of straw in the corner. She considered climbing in. Compared to the dragon, the pigs smelled springtime fresh. Then she spotted a small, lopsided barn just a few feet away.

  She ran for the stone wall of the house, and, pressing against it, she snuck toward a corner and peeked around. A rectangular patch of light streamed to the ground through a front window. She avoided it, and dashed for the barn.

  The barn door was ajar. She moved to ease herself through it, but a water trough caught her eye. She dropped to her knees, and dipped a hand into the water. It tasted of dust. She was briefly glad for the dusk, so she couldn’t see the water as she cupped it again and again to her mouth, barely breathing between swallows.

  It wasn’t enough. She leaned over the side of trough, and with a splash, immersed her whole head. She shook her hair, and blew bubbles that tickled her nose. Then she withdrew with a gasp. She probably smelled like a pig, and looked like one, too, but she didn’t care. She felt immensely better.

  “What do you do there?” said a man’s voice. She shrieked and dove through the barn door, tripping on her own feet. She sprawled on the dirt floor.

  A stream of moonlight widened near her hand. The scrape of the opening door drowned out her second cry of fear. She scrambled to her feet, and whirled around to face the man, realizing too late she’d just trapped herself in the barn with him.

  “What are you doing?” he repeated.

  She could think of no excuse fast enough. She could think of nothing at all. His dark, angry eyes consumed the last of her strength, and her legs gave out. She dropped onto a scratchy pile of straw.