Trees a-slant the slope rose.
She pulled on the reins, hard. Wings flopped, fluttered, flapped behind her knees; pryn leaned back in wind, searching for ledges in the mountains that were now all around.
She glanced down to see the clearing — without a ledge any side! Treetops veered, neared.
That was where they were going to land…? Leaves a-top a tall tree slapped her toes, stinging. She yanked vines. Dragon wings rose, which meant those green membranes between the long bones would not tear on the branches. But they were falling — no, still gliding. She swallowed air. The dragon tilted, beating back against her own flight — pryn rocked against the bony neck. Reins tight, she knuckled scales. Dragon muscle moved under her legs. A moment’s floating, when she managed to push back and blink. And blinked again —
— because they jarred, stopping, on pebbles and scrub.
A lurch: the dragon stepped forward.
Another lurch: another step.
She pulled on the reins again. The slow creature lurched another step and…halted.
She craned to see the trees behind her. Above them, rock —
‘Hello!’
The dragon took another step; pryn swung forward.
The woman, cross-legged across the clearing by the fireplace, uncrossed and pushed to one knee. ‘Hello, there!’ She stood, putting a hand on the provision cart’s rail. ‘That your dragon?’ The ox bent to tear up ragged rockweed; the cart rumbled for inches. The rail slipped under the woman’s palm.
Swinging her leg over the dragon’s neck, pryn slid down scales, feeling her leather skirt roll up the backs of her thighs. On rough ground she landed on two feet and a fist — ‘Yes…!’—and came erect in time to duck the wing that opened, beat once, then folded. ‘I mean — I rode it…’
The woman was middle-aged, some red left in her hair. Her face was sunburned and freckled.
With suspicion and curiosity, pryn blinked. Then, because she had flown, pryn laughed. It was the full, foaming laugh of a loud brown fifteen-year-old with bushy hair. It broke up fear, exploded curiosity, and seemed — to the woman, at any rate — to make the heavy, short girl one with the pine needles and shale chips and long, long clouds pulled sheer enough to see blue through.
That was why the woman laughed too.
The dragon swung her head, opened her beak, and hissed over stained, near-useless teeth, tiny in mottled gum.
The girl stepped up on a mossy rock. ‘Who are you?’
‘Norema the tale-teller,’ the woman said. She put both hands in the pocket of her leggings and took a long step across the burnt-out fireplace. ‘Who are you?’
‘I am pryn, the…adventurer, pryn the warrior, pryn the thief!’ said pryn, who had never stolen anything in her life other than a ground oaten cake from the lip of her cousin’s baking oven three weeks before — she’d felt guilty for days!
‘You’re going to have trouble getting that dragon to take off again.’
The girl’s face moved from leftover laugh to scowl. ‘Don’t I know it!’
The ox took another step. The cart’s plank wheels made brief noises among themselves and on small stones. The ox blinked at the dragon, which stood now, one foreclaw raised.
Dragons sometimes stood like that a long time.
‘You’re not one of the regular dragon grooms — the little girls they keep in the corrals above Ellamon…?’
The ox tore up more rockweed.
The girl shook her head. ‘But I live in Ellamon — just outside Ellamon, actually. With my great-aunt. I’ve seen them, though, flying their dragons with their trainers and guards for the tourists who go out to the hill to watch. They’re all bad girls, you know. Girls who’ve struck their mothers or disobeyed their fathers, stolen things, sometimes even killed people. They’ve been brought from all over Nevèrÿon — ’
‘…adventures, warriors,’ Norema suggested, ‘thieves?’
The girl looked at the ground, turning her bare foot on sand. ‘You’re a foreigner. You probably don’t know much about dragons, or the bad girls who ride them.’
‘Oh,’ Norema said, ‘one hears fables. Also, I’ve been through this strange and…well, this strange land before. What were you doing on that dragon?’
‘Flying,’ pryn answered, then wondered if that sounded disingenuous. She bent to brush a dusty hand against a dusty knee. ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And I’m growing — everyone always tells me how much I’m growing. So I thought: soon I shall be too tall or too fat. I’d better do it now. The girls they use for riders up in the dragon corrals are half starved anyway, till they’re thin as twigs. They’re all twelve and thirteen years old — forever, it seems like.’ She smoothed her overblouse down her waistless stomach. ‘I’m short. But I’m not thin.’
‘True,’ Norema said, ‘you’re not. But you look strong. And I like your laugh.’
‘I don’t know how strong I am either,’ pryn said, ‘but I caught a wild dragon, bridled her, and led her to a ledge.’
‘That seems strong enough.’
‘You’ve been here before…?’ It sounded more suspicious than pryn meant. But suspicion was a habit of tongue picked up from her aunt more than a habit of mind; and, anyway, her laugh belied it. ‘What are you doing here now?’
‘Looking for a friend,’ Norema said. ‘A friend of mine. Years ago she used to be a guard at the dragon corrals and told me all about those…bad girls. My friend wore blue stone beads in her hair and a black rag mask across her eyes; and she killed with a double-bladed sword. We were companions and traveled together several years.’
‘What happened to her?’ pryn asked.
‘Oh,’ Norema said. ‘I told her tales — long, marvelous, fascinating tales. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if they were tales told to me when I was a child, or tales I’d made up. I told her tales, and after a while my masked friend grew more interested in the tales than she was in me. One night, sitting on her side of the campfire, cleaning her double blade, she told me she was going off the next morning to see if one particular tale I told were true. The next day when I woke, she and her bedroll were gone — along with her double-bladed sword. Nor was I worried. We were the kind of friends who frequently went separate ways — for days, even weeks. But weeks became months; and I did not run across my friend’s campfire on the rim of the Menyat canyon, nor did I hear any word of her tramping along the northernmost Faltha escarpments, nor did I meet her taking shade in one of the Makalata caves at the rim of the western desert, nor did I hear rumor of her lean-to set up a mile further down the beach at Sarness.’
Squatting, pryn picked up a stick. ‘So what did you do?’ She scratched at spilled ash.
‘I decided to take my cart and go look for her. I’ve looked many places; no doubt I’ll look many more. But I’ve come to Ellamon because my friend once worked here and was happy.’
‘Mmm,’ pryn said, suspiciously.
The woman looked down to see what pryn had been scratching. ‘“Pyre,”’ she read. ‘“Ynn.” Pyre-ynn?’
‘“…pryn”,’ pryn said. ‘That is my name. In writing.’
The woman stepped around the figures and squatted too. ‘Here.’ She took the stick and added a line above the two syllabics the girl had etched in ash. ‘You, “pryn”. That’s your name. In writing. That line there means you squish the two sounds together into one. Otherwise you’ll have people mispronouncing it every which way.’
In late sunlight pryn squinted at the woman. ‘How do you know?’
‘Actually — ’ the woman looked back at pryn with a moment’s uncertainty — ‘because I invented it.’