Redheart (Leland Dragon Series) (3 page)

Chapter Five

Kallon swerved for a landing in the fading light of late afternoon. He’d flown far and fast, only slowing when his wings began to ache as though they might drop off. He’d pushed himself until he was weary and empty, as he always did. Even still, rest evaded him as it always did. He lingered, swooping and circling over his foothills, aimless.

Perhaps it would be a nice night for sleeping near the mountain lake. The pines were crisp and fresh in the cool air, so different from the arid wind near the human village. The thought made him wonder how much longer he had to enjoy the lake before it, too, disappeared into dust, as so much Leland water had already done. And not just the water, but the land as well. All around him, brown death crept on silent feet, slowly overtaking. Even his cave, hidden deep in the mountains, was beginning to feel different. Unfamiliar.

He considered the lake again, and paused to stare off in that direction. He scowled. It was too far. He was too tired.

He supposed he would just go home. He should have been satisfied at the thought. The human had no doubt moved on, and he would again, finally, know a long, blessed night of solitude, without her jabbering in her sleep at all hours. So what if the emptiness of his cave somehow felt lonelier? He was always lonely, and he liked it that way. It would be good to have his home back to himself. He was relieved, no, overjoyed to be alone again.

He thumped to the ground. Then his nostrils widened. Faintly, he detected the human’s scent. He poked his head into his cave. “Still here?”

There was a sniff, and a shuffling. “Yes.”

He snatched back his head in surprise. She’d stayed after all? In went his head again. “Why?”

“Well,” whispered the human so quietly, that if Kallon’s ears weren’t so sensitive, her voice might not be heard at all. “At first I waited so I could thank you.”

He didn’t know what to make of it. He hadn’t expected her to stay, and hadn’t expected his heart to skip when he heard her speak. He dropped his flanks to the ground, and sat, bewildered.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked, her voice stronger.

He didn’t know the answer to the question.

“I’ll go if you want.”

“Dark is near,” he finally said, pushing to his feet to lope inside. He lowered his snout to peer at the tiny creature where she sat against the wall, hugging her knees. There was still fear in her eyes, but she met his gaze. “Do you want to go?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Not in the dark.”

“Then stay if you want.” He scooped up the wooden mug where it lay on its side, and plunged it into a small bucket of liquid. “Should drink more.” He offered her the mug.

The girl nodded, but didn’t reach for it.

“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 asked. “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?”