Tillie’s gasp faded into a chuckle. “Dane! This looks beautiful. I had no idea you could do something like this!”
“Don’t give him all the credit.” Cadence set the basket on the table. “I donated the glasses. And commandeered a couple recipes, since neither of us knows how to cook. But everything else? All him.” She showed Rowan to his chair and then seated herself.
Dane’s hearth was occupied by two pots. Tillie followed him over and took a peek.
“Roast chicken, and a fiddlehead casserole? Dane, you’ve outdone yourself! I wish you had told me the big news so I could have helped, or at least brought the wine!”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.” His sparse collection of kitchen tools was laid out on a small countertop by the hearth. He picked up the knife and started carving the chicken. “I don’t really have anyone to surprise with good news these days. And Great Aunt Mattie couldn’t make the trip this time around.”
“We’ll get her over here next time!” Tillie smiled and helped him serve. “And if you really want a crowd, I’m sure my mother would join us, too.”
“I don’t know that my little cabin can handle that many people,” he laughed.
Dinner was served with fresh bread and local wine. Dane was excited to finally share his experiences at the Sanctum, making sure to let everyone at the table know that he had much more knowledge than his fellow students.
“Didn’t feel fair, really,” he said between sips of wine. “When it came time to prove I knew the material, it almost felt like I was showing off. Doesn’t help, either, when my classmates ask what position in the Sanctum I’m training for and I just tell them I’m trying to be a better trained grave warden.”
“So then, Dane,” Cadence paused, still uncomfortable with the informality of first names, “is it safe to say that you are prepared for your next course?”
“Absolutely!” He raised his glass. “The letter said the second course starts on the last day of summer. It’s nice that the Sanctum appointed someone to watch over the cemetery on the days I have to be in Beralin.”
Cadence chewed her food, fighting back a grin. “We wouldn’t want you to be stressed over the curriculum and your job.”
“Agreed! The students are all telling me that the instructor for the second course is a tough one.”
“They are correct. But let’s not fret about it, shall we?” Cadence raised her glass for a toast. “We should celebrate your success! There is time to worry about your course on the last day of summer, where I will expect to see you and your classmates at dawn.”
Dane started to raise his glass then stopped. “What was that?”
“Mister Sheltier, I am your second course instructor.” Cadence finally let the smile onto her face and beamed at them all. “You’d better be ready.”
The End
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Dragon Bound
By: Susannah Shannon
Untitled
Table of Contents
1. Amongst the Clouds
2. A Well-Roasted Breakfast
3. An Impossible Proposal
4. An Unplanned Courtship
5. A Royal Introduction
6. The Drakesalve Extraction
7. A Dowry of Amethyst
8. The Carnality of Dragons
9. The Libelous Ballad
10. The Delphine Declaration
Chapter 1
Amongst the Clouds
Pa and Grimmie were fighting. Again. Eavesdropping was rude, but the caravan was not big enough for her to avoid hearing. Astra did what any well-raised Cloudtreader would do. She kept her eyes tightly closed and pretended that she couldn’t hear them.
“She’s 19. You can’t pretend forever.” Grimmie said.
Pa gave a noncommittal grunt, “Well, not everyone gets married. Happens.”
Grimmie sighed, “I didn’t expect that from you.”
Pa’s voice grew sharp, “Then you weren’t paying attention. I told you that nothing mattered more than Astra. Nothing! Back when you promised to be by our side.”
Even with her eyes closed, Astra knew that her grandmother was pulling herself up top to every inch of her not at all substantial height. “I am on your side.” Grimmie said it with the tone of one who has gone from being a perpetually, peevish elderly woman to something all the more dangerous. Pa did not heed the warning.
Astra could hear the telltale signs of her father putting his work tools away. He oiled them and repacked them every night. “If you were on my side, you wouldn't be pestering me about things I don't care about.”
“You wouldn’t think a man would want his only daughter to be alone all of her life.”
Astra opened her eyes, grateful for the curtain that shielded the bed she shared with Grimmie from the rest of the caravan.
She pretended that she had accepted her fate. That being bound to an inferior dragon, and living with her father and grandmother all of her life was what she wanted. Astra reached over with her right hand, and stroked the dragon mark outlined on the back of her left.
“You know it doesn't have to be this way…”
The slam of her father's fist onto the table made Astra jump in her hidden away bed. “Never! It will not pass to her shoulders. I swore to Hya.”
Grimmie whispered fiercely through her teeth. “I know precisely what you promised Hyacinth, and I know why. You are not the only one who loved her.”
Astra had long known that Grimmie still mourned the death of her daughter. “I have sworn my life to protect our girl. I left my own kin to insure she was safe.”
Pa lashed out, “Well, you can go back to whoever will take you in. We don’t need you, anyway.”
Astra grimaced, not liking that he could be so unkind to the woman who had raised her after her mother had died.
“If you think that anything could make me desert our girl, then Guthrie Drakesalve, you are further lost than I realized.” Grimmie marched to the end of the caravan where Astra was pretending to sleep behind the curtain and climbed in beside her.
By now, most of Astra’s friends slept in their own caravans with their siblings. Astra Drakesalve had no younger brothers or sisters, only her frequently quarreling father and grandmother.
Pa’s bed pulled down from the helm of the caravan while Grimmie and Astra shared the bed at the back. Astra felt the rigid, angular form of her grandmother slid in beside her. Grandmothers among the cloudtreaders tended to be soft and round with kerchiefs on their heads. There was nothing soft about Grimmie. She was always corseted within an inch of her life and insisted on wearing her hair in the elaborate, piled-high styles that had been popular long before Astra had been born.
“And now you need to actually go to sleep,” Grimmie whispered.
“It’s all right, Grimmie, I don’t want to be married.” Astra whispered.
“Go to sleep,” came the roar from the other side of the curtains. “By cumulus, we all have work to do in the morning!” Astra could hear her father turn himself over grouchily. With the merest flicker of her eyelashes, she showed her Grimmie that she had no intention of going right to sleep.
Her grandmother reached for her hand. They had always been able to communicate silently but only when they were touching.
“Tell me about her,” Astra breathed. “Tell me about my mother.”
Grimmie's strong, tiny hand rested on Astra’s closed eyelids.
Within her chest, the visions rose. A girl on a swing, her long, violet-colored hair streaming behind her. She had seen this image over and over again. Always before it had been enough. It wasn't this time. Without even whispering, “Show me more,” she conveyed the thought to Grimmie.
A hitherto unseen image rose this time. The same girl, older now, playing hide-and-seek with a man that Astra couldn't see. The laugh of the lovers caused sparks to fly behind her eyelids. Astra opened he
r eyes. Her mother had been running on the ground. The ground. Cloudtreaders did not deign to walk on the ground.
Shepherd Ezekiel had spoken on the necessity of maintaining the scriptures at High Mass just the day before. “We were rescued from the pit of the earth, allowed to sail in zeppelins closer to the creator. What order were things created in?”
Every child knew the answer, “The heavens and then the earth.”
Shepherd Ezekiel had smiled then, his bony face still not at all cordial. “We know that that’s right. The heavens first. First, mind you! The earth was an afterthought. We could live down there. We could.”
Everyone in the congregation had shuddered. “But we don't because the Starkindler has given us the means of sanctifying every second of our lives. We follow the precepts given to us in the Breath of Life. Does the Starkindler want us to have things easy?”
“No!” the children, including Astra, had shouted in response. “He wants us to be holy!”
Astra had never been told that her mother had once capered around the earth with some unknown man. She turned over, fully intending to interrogate Grimmie, but the old woman putting a finger to her lips, stopped the girl. Without needing the words to be spoken, Astra realized that her grandmother would explain as soon as she could, as she had always been able to. Grimmie blew a kiss towards Astra, and under its weight, Astra’s eyelids began to drift closed.
When Astra awoke, Grimmie and her father had long been up. The telltale sound of creaking chains lured her to stick her head out of the caravan.
They had spent the night in formation, the dragons released, and the community caravans chained together, tightly controlled by an airstream anchor.
Unsure where the rest of her family had gone, Astra nevertheless knew what needed to be done.
“Ahoy!” cried Captain Mistral from the nearby caravan. “Hands to the rigging? No gear unstowed?”
Astra knew without looking that everything on the caravan was precisely where it belonged. “Aye, I will rig!” she assured her neighbor.
“Carry on,” came his clear firm command. Mistral paused for the merest of second before relaying the message further down the line, “Drakesalve's bearing away, ready to move!”
“Ahoy!” came the cry from other cloudtreaders in their community.
She unlatched the hand crank and began to twist it vigorously. “Helio!” she called out cheerfully. “C’mon, girl!” As she turned the crank, the chain began to move towards her caravan, dislodging from the others. It took several minutes of vigorously hard work, but Astra was able to detach and wind up the chains. When they were anchored in one spot, the caravan ships were chained together. Every other time, they were an independent lot.
Heliotrope arrived just as the chain was wound up. Helio was not a particularly large dragon. In fact, she could accurately, if unkindly, be described as underwhelming. Astra turned a series of keys, and a crane extended from the front of the caravan. With Helio happily flying under it, Astra was able to latch the harness.
The caravan gave a great lurch as it shed its nighttime placidity, and began to bustle towards whatever adventures the day held. Astra perched on the bench at the front of the caravan, its scarlet canopy arched over her head.
“How was your night, girl? Did you get plenty to eat?” The vigor with which Helio pulled the caravan through the blue sky seemed to indicate that she had had plenty to eat.
Astra could sense Helio’s contentment. Bonded dragons were almost unheard of among the cloudtreaders. The one person she could ask about her relationship with her dragon was her father. However, Guthrie had made it clear that he would not talk about it.
There were legends that implied it had once been commonplace, but Astra knew of no one else who was dragon bound. Heliotrope should have made Astra the most desired bride in the congregation. As things stood, it was a major liability.
There were ten whispers that must be something wrong with Astra. Historically, the strongest, most beautiful babies were chosen by very young dragons to grow old together. She was quite simply an embarrassment, and so was her dragon.
The older dragons did not require any guidance. They seemed to know precisely where the flotilla of caravans needed to go. Helio was not your typical cloudtreader dragon. She was prone to slamming into the compatriots and flipping Astra and her things all topsy-turvy.
The Drakesalve’s had resigned themselves to her flaws, and kept everything tightly secured. Some of their community was not quite so fastidious, and nothing makes a merchant angrier than his wares being strewn throughout the ether.
Astra cast a nervous glance at the undulating shoulders of the family dragon. “Be careful, Helio.”
Helio was not careful and careened into a larger dragon that was busily pulling the ironware merchants caravan. Grimmie took advantage of the collision and leapt from the merchant's wagon landing neatly beside Astra in the driver's bench. “Good morning, sparrow,” the older woman said.
“Where’s Pa?”
“He went to help the candlemaker’s vixen. She’s torn her wing, again.”
Astra took advantage of this opening to ask, “Are they really dying out?”
Grimmie arched an eyebrow, “I knew you were pretending.”
Astra arched hers right back, “That is neither here, nor there. I hadn't noticed the dragons dying out.”
“Has your father gone to any hatchings lately?”
Astra had to admit that he hadn't. “So new ones aren't being born?”
Before Grimmie could respond, Helio drove them straight into a rain cloud. Suddenly, drenched women dove through the mouth of the caravan.
“I swear to the Starkindler, that sky serpent was dropped on her head right after hatching,” Grimmie said peevishly. “Get out of those soaked things.”
Astra hurried out of her sodden clothes. Stepping out of the squelching pile, Grimmie tossed her a towel, and she dried herself off briskly. Pulling a fresh shirt out of the trunk, Astra pulled it over her head. She added a woolen dress and warm stockings. Life among the clouds was a chilly endeavor.
“Bog pits and graveyards, my boots are wet.” The thought of spending the rest of the day in soaked, cold boots was a miserable one in deed.
Grimmie reached down and picked them up, giving them a firm shake. “You got lucky. They aren't that wet.” Astonishingly, that was true. With a sigh of relief, Astra pulled the warm, dry boots on and laced them firmly.
Grimmie always wore layers of clothing. She lifted her outermost dress off and hung it on a hook to dry. Her trim figure was lost in the masses of petticoats and chemises she wore. Smoothing the fresh dress over her voluminous under-layers, Grimmie turned to Astra.
“The pelicans arrived early this morning. We should get some breakfast.”
“What did the pelicans bring?”
“Plums. Green beans, some corn. Your dad bagged some pigeons yesterday. I’ll wash the berries if you’ll warm up the pigeons.”
Grimmie opened the faucet of the rainwater barrel and filled a bucket. She was less meticulous than the other cloudtreader housewives were. Astra had noticed that even as a child. Everyone knew that dirt was dangerous, resulting as it did from graves, and volcanoes, and animal droppings. Filthy. Grimmie never served food that had visible dirt, but Astra knew that she didn't do the 19 ritual washings that her friend’s mothers all did.
The dereliction of Ezekiel made the other cloudtreader women shake their heads. Only the Starkindler knew why he made the foods that had to be eaten to maintain health grow in such a disgusting place.
Shepherd Ezekiel had much to say on the matter. It was to remind them that even the cloudtreaders, the holiest order of creation, could never totally separate from their earthly nature.
There were rumors of desperate families eating vegetables that had actually touched the earth, but nobody Astra knew had ever done such a thing. The harvesters would fly their caravans low and climb down ropes to gather food that climbed toward
s the Starkindler as dinner. Pelicans carried each caravan their groceries.
Leaving Grimmie to scouring the plums, Astra placed the pigeon in a small metal box with a ring firmly secured to the top. This was attached to a chain on a long pole.
Chapter 2
A Well-Roasted Breakfast
Astra was about to climb onto the drivers bench when Captain Mistral whistled at her. “Nah, lass. Helio is too unpredictable. Use my Reynard...” It was humiliating to be known as having an unreliable, badly trained dragon. However, the offer was a relief. Reynard was an enormous male dragon who was so well controlled that he could land on the head of a pin.
Captain Mistral had the most powerful ship in the congregation. It bore the unmistakably tall “Skyscraper” sail. Shepherd Ezekiel made secure the souls of his congregation, but it was Captain Mistral who made the sky caravans function.
Securing the chain to the rear of the caravan, Astra called, “Helio... Hyup!” Thankfully, the young female dragon did heed the command and fly faster. Towing the metal box behind them, allowed Reynard to come closer, and blow his fire onto the oven box. Reynard was powerful and able to perfectly direct his flame. It took less than five minutes for their meal to be cooked.
Astra’s rumbling stomach made her glad that she hadn't tried to dangle her breakfast in front of Helio. Helio was likely to get confused, and set the caravan on fire, or knock Astra to her death. She hollered a grateful, “Calm currents to you and yours!” to Captain Mistral, and holding the pole that dangled the cooked food in front of her, she carefully turned into the caravan.
Grimmie used a hot pad to remove the metal pan and open it up. The smell of warm freshly roasted pigeon filled the air.
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