by Jane Yolen
He remembered the first time he had gone back, several weeks after the fight with Rum. Wanting to claim the remaining rows of weed and wort plants in order to keep his debt to Sarkkhan down, he stripped the stalks with care. He had been at work for only a few minutes when he heard a familiar mocking laugh. He turned and had seen Akki standing near the shelter, her hands on her hips.
"I hear you won," she said. "Ardru was there. In the 'Master Box. Did you see him? Was it exciting? Was it worth the risk?"
He had walked over to her slowly. "Why haven't you returned to the nursery?" he asked.
"Do you always answer questions with a question?" she countered. They had both laughed.
Later she told him she would never come back. "I only stayed as long as I did to help you. Because you had a dream, just like me. If dreamers don't help one another ... But once your dream came true, it was time for me to go. I don't really belong in a nursery. Not anymore. I am both master and bonder," she said. "And I will let no man fill my bag."
Then she added, almost under her breath, "I left the gold Sarkkhan paid for my bond on his pillow."
Jakkin did not ask her how she got the gold.
"I know Sarkkhan is your father," he said quietly.
"I am not responsible for that."
"Then why must you go away?" he asked.
"I just told you," she said. "Weren't you listening?"
"You answered my question with a question," Jakkin whispered. "I don't want you to go."
She said nothing, just looked at him strangely and left.
***
THE SECOND TIME she had come during the day when Jakkin had taken Heart's Blood for a run and a day of training. The dragon was often restless if he left her confined too long in the barn. She needed to fly in great wheeling arcs over the oasis. And Jakkin always felt he had passed some kind of important test each time the dragon returned to his side.
It was Heart's Blood who had first sensed Akki's approach, casting a gold silhouette in Jakkin's mind. He recognized it immediately as Akki, though it was many minutes more before she actually came into view.
"How do you know when I am going to be here?" he asked.
"I don't. Sometimes I come when you aren't here," she said. "And I lie down by the pool and remember. Or forget."
He wanted to ask, "Remember what? Forget what?" But he didn't. Instead, he lay down in the sand with his head resting on the dragon's flank. Akki sat beside him. They held hands. That was the day they hardly spoke at all.
***
THE LAST TIME he had seen Akki was a night when he had come out to the oasis to sit and think and be by himself. He had been worrying about an approaching fight and his nervousness had communicated itself to Heart's Blood. So he had come alone, expecting no one.
It had been a night of many breezes, and the swirling patterns of sand had changed over and over, a kaleidoscope whose pieces were shaken by the winds.
Jakkin had been sitting by the shelter with his eyes closed when suddenly he felt Akki by his side. She had moved up close to him without warning, putting her hands on either side of his face. Her palms felt as hot as dragon's blood on his cheeks.
She pulled him toward her and kissed him slowly, gently. She seemed to know what she was doing and he let himself almost drown in the sweetness of her kiss. Then she pulled ' away suddenly and said, "I have to go away. Really go away this time."
He had laughed nervously, saying, "You can't, you know. You belong here. With me. Your father gave you to me. He said you needed a master."
She stood up. "You're such a boy, sometimes, Jakkin Stewart. Such a child. And so is he." She turned and walked away.
Jakkin had scrambled up after her, but she had run from him across the sand. He tried to follow her and suddenly heard the roar of a truck engine ahead of him. All he found were deep tire ruts in the sand.
***
JAKKIN CAME UPON the oasis and listened, stroking the bond bag he still wore around his neck. It was plump and jangling with coins. He had earned enough from the three fights to pay Sarkkhan his bond and to buy Errikkin's bond paper as well. He still owed Sarkkhan: gold for the barn and for feed, and the choice of the second hatching. But he owed it freely, master to master. He was his own master now. He need not wear his bag.
But Jakkin had sworn to himself that he would wear it until he could pour out the gold from the bag into Akki's hands and she accepted him as a master and a man. It was a promise he made to himself, and he was a man who kept his promises. He hoped he would not have to wait too long.
Jakkin and Heart's Blood's story is not over.
Turn the page for a thrilling preview of
HEART'S BLOOD
The second book in the Pit Dragon Trilogy
1
THE SECOND MOON had just lipped the horizon when Jakkin checked the barn again. His great red dragon, Heart's Blood, was near her birthing time, and he was more nervous than she. All day he had wandered uneasily, walking from bondhouse to the fields, then back to the barn, looking in on the dragon frequently as she lay in her birth stall, grooming herself. He had rubbed her nose, patted her head between the vestigial earflaps, crooned old nursery lullabies. Then, tight with inexpressible feelings, he would leap up and run out of the barn, threading his way across the fields of shoulder-high burnwort or bursting into the bondhouse to watch fat Kkarina cook.
"Get out," Kkarina had shouted at him the last time he had invaded her kitchen. She waved a large wooden spoon at him. "You're making me nervous with your pacing. Don't worry so. The dragon will know what to do when the eggs come. Believe me."
Jakkin believed her all right. But he doubted he would know what to do. Should he crowd into the room with Heart's Blood? Or should he observe the egg laying from the peephole in the door, as Master Sarkkhan advised? Or should he stay away from the barn altogether, as old Likkarn had pointedly told him to do?
"You'll only send her your own fears," Likkarn said. "You transmit well with that worm. She'll add your worries to her own. Don't be more of an idiot, boy, than you already are."
But Jakkin couldn't stay away from the barn and his red. They had been together almost two years, but in those two years they had grown up together, their thoughts linked in great colored patterns. He wouldn't desert her now.
As he opened the barn door, he was hit with the blood-red tide of her sending and knew it was time. Running down the corridor, he called, "Easy, easy, my beauty." But there was no recognition in her churning reply.
He threw open the door of the birthing room and was almost overwhelmed by the power of her thoughts. Suddenly he felt as she felt; for the first time there seemed no separation between them. He was engulfed in the colors as if he himself were a great dragon hen.
The pressure in her birth canal sent waves rolling under the sternum and along her heavy stomach muscles. She fluttered her wings, then pressed them against her sides, letting the edges touch her belly. Stretching her neck to its fullest, she looked around, scouting the area for danger, an unconscious gesture left over from the eons when dragons had given birth in mountain caves. The skin protrusions over her ear holes fluttered.
Jakkin spoke again, making the sounds into a soothing chant. "Easy, easy, my beauty, easy, easy, my red."
Heart's Blood opened her mouth as if to scream an answer into the dry air, but because she was a mute, the only sounds that came out were a hungry panting: in and out, in and out.
As Jakkin watched, she circled the cavernous room three times in a halting rhythm, squatting at last over a shallow hole she had dug in the sandy floor only that day. Then, with one final push, she began to lay.
The eggs popped out between her hind legs, a continuous production, cascading down into the sandy nest, piling on top of one another, and quickly building up into a shaky cream-colored pyramid.
Jakkin could scarcely breathe as he watched. He leaned back against the wooden wall, waiting, running his fingers through his hair, and stroking the leath
er bondbag at his neck. He longed to stroke the dragon's neck as well but feared to distract her, though he guessed she wouldn't have even noticed his touch. She was too far caught up in the birthing rhythms.
"Easy, easy," he crooned again.
The dragon shook her head, and Jakkin felt a spillage of her usual rainbow sending patterns shoot through his mind in colors that were a riot of reds: scarlet, carnation, crimson, and rose; fiery gems strung on a strand of thought. For each egg, another ruby-colored jewel, and he knew there would be upward of a hundred eggs.
Perhaps Likkarn was right, and he shouldn't be here in the room with her. Jakkin's instant of uneasiness made the dragon look up for a moment, causing a halt in the laying.
Jakkin smiled at her and let his thoughts gentle. She looked away, and the eggs started out again. Sliding down to the ground, Jakkin wondered, Maybe old Likkarn was right for ordinary dragons, but Heart's Blood is not ordinary.
"Thou art a rare beast indeed," he whispered, comforting both himself and the red with the archaic language trainers used with the big beasts. He stroked the bondbag again and, feeling a large measure of calm now within himself, concentrated on sending Heart's Blood a single image to help ease the passage of the eggs. He thought of a ribbon of clear blue water lying across a sun-flecked base of sand. One edge of the ribbon was lined with sand-colored kkhan reeds. The image was cool, quiet, familiar. It was a picture of the oasis where, for a year, Jakkin had raised the dragon, watching her change from a scum-colored, wrinkled-skin hatchling into a great responding red.
The dragon's muscles never ceased their straining, but her massive head turned once again toward the boy. The black shrouds of her eyes lit for a moment with the crackle of red light known as dragon's fire. Then the eyes went dark again as she turned her thoughts inward and attended to the laying of her eggs.
Jakkin knew it would take her the better part of the night. The barn was heated for the egg laying and warmed as well by the dragon's body. It would be hot enough, even in the fiercest cold of Dark After, for him to stay. But first he wanted to tell his friends, the bonders in the nursery, that she had started to lay.
***
"EARLY LAID, EARLY PAID." Slakk greeted the news with the old saying. "What luck you have, Jakkin." He was sitting in the dining room, playing a hand of Four-man Flikk with the other boys.
Jakkin stumbled against the table.
"Lucky, you mean, that he's not the one with the eggs," shouted red-haired Trikko. "They'd all be splattered by now."
"How many so far?" asked Slakk.
"Worm waste, they're just now laid, not hatched," growled Balakk from the table where the older man sat talking. "You've lived all your life in a nursery, boy, and still you know nothing."
Slakk ignored him. "How many do you think will hatch? There's good coins there."
Jakkin rubbed his arm thoughtfully, tracing the thin bracelet of scar tissue that ran around his wrist. "I don't know, Slakk."
"Guess."
"I hope for five or six live, of course. But I'll be thankful for any."
"I bet nine," said Slakk. "A gold says nine." He dug into his bondbag and pulled out a coin, letting it drop onto the table.
"It's a first birth," Jo-Janekk called from the other table. Next to him Balakk nodded. "And that means fewer live. My gold to yours that he gets only three worth selling and one to keep." He opened his bag, drew out a coin, and slammed it down on the table in front of him.
"My master," said Errikkin, standing up and putting his hand on Jakkin's shoulder, "my master's beast will outbreed any on the farm. Just as she can outfight them. I'll go one higher than Slakk. One higher than any of you. A gold for ten."
"Oh for God's sake," muttered Jakkin to Errikkin, "save your coins. Don't waste them on such foolishness. Of course, she's not going to have ten live. They never do."
But Errikkin shook his head and smiled brightly. "Ten, I say."
Slakk laughed. "You should have had Jakkin buy your brains when he bought your bond, Errikkin. I'll take your gold—as always."
"Lend me a gold, Slakk. I'm flat," Trikko begged. "I want to bet, too."
"No."
Balakk called out, "Three. Put me down for three."
Quickly the others placed bets.
From the corner where he was sitting alone, Likkarn rose. His weed-reddened eyes were rheumy, hazed over as if with a smoky film, but his voice was steady and low. "My guess is she'll have five. And one born crooked. It's all in the way you read the breed lines, boys. I'll take your one gold and add another for you to match. And I'll spend your money in Krakkow next Bond-Off, laughing at you all." He slammed the two coins on the table in front of Slakk, then went out the door.
"Old Likk-and-Spittle," said Slakk as the door shut, but he was careful to say nothing until Likkarn was out of hearing. "What does he know?"
"More than you ever will, bonder," Balakk said. "Put your money down."
Jakkin left, too, the sound of coins on the table accompanying him. The bickering was getting on his nerves, but what bothered him the most was the callous betting on Heart's Blood's eggs. All that dragons meant to the bondboys was money. "First laid, first paid," indeed. Heart's Blood was more than just a brood hen, more than just a mighty Pit fighter. She was—his other self, he supposed.
He went into his room, grabbed the blanket from the bed, and went back to the barn.