Dragonjacks: Book 1 - The Shepherd: A Dragons of Cadwaller Novel

by Vickie Knestaut

  The Shepherd turned away and started for the horses tethered to a series of posts and rails at the front of the house. His men followed him, and as they departed, Tyber looked at Brath, who glared openly at Ander with hate and disgust.

  “Come on,” Brath said, turning to the other dragonjacks. “Let’s see to Sirvon.”

  Chapter 18

  Several of the dragonjacks started after Brath. A few looked to Ander at first, then fell in behind the others as they started toward the weyr.

  Tyber watched for a few seconds, then turned to Ander. The dragoneer shook his head as if Tyber had actually considered going after them and offering a hand.

  Ren ran a hand through his hair and shook his head as if in disbelief. “What do you make of that?” he asked quietly as he watched The Shepherd and his men interact with the people in front of the house. A woman continued to sob openly, her face buried in the shoulder of another, her hand clutching the opposite shoulder. The hem of her skirts swayed as if there was a slight breeze, but there was nothing but light and heat and dust in the air.

  “I think we better be careful and watch our every step,” Ander said as he folded his arms before himself.

  Tyber stepped up to his other side and turned his back on The Shepherd. “Can we send Ren off to the mother city or Aerona?”

  Ander shook his head. “Too dangerous. That would tip our hand.”

  “How are we going to catch him?”

  “We’ll have to wait. And in the meantime, we’ll have to do our best to earn his trust. His and that of the other dragonjacks.”

  “The other dragonjacks?” Tyber said. “You make it sound like we’re part of them.”

  “I am the dragoneer of this horde. They are not hordesmen. That makes us dragonjacks as well.”

  “Father would be so proud,” Ren muttered.

  Tyber peered at the weyr as if he might see through it, see the dragonjacks on the other side and what it was they were doing with Sirvon’s body. He started to ask Ander what they’d do about the other dragons, but it was a pointless question. What could be done?

  His back straightened. He looked at Ander. “What if we tell The Shepherd that we know a dragon healer. Then you can send one of—”

  “Enough,” Ander said. “I know a lot has happened in the last couple of days, but we have to keep the mission in mind. Our duty is to apprehend The Shepherd and put him before the King. Our duty to the King always comes first. After we do what we were sent to do, then we’ll worry about what to do with the others.”

  Ander looked back to The Shepherd. It was plain to see that the worrying wouldn’t wait until after The Shepherd was in their custody.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Tyber said. “I want to check on Rius.”

  “Good idea,” Ander said.

  As Tyber started for the weyr, Ren hurried to his side.

  “Watch yourself,” Ren said, his voice low.

  “What do you mean?” Tyber asked. He glanced at Ren, but his attention caught on the front of the house. The Shepherd was climbing back onto his horse. The sobbing woman was being led toward the open doorway of the house and the shadows beyond. The older woman who held up the sobbing woman looked at Tyber and Ren. Her expression was hard, unkind, like a club swept at them even though she was too far away to strike.

  “I mean,” Ren said, “that I know you inside and out, and I’m warning you not to start thinking about these people as people. They’re killers and thieves. These are the kind of people who killed Fang.”

  Tyber’s stare hardened as well. The woman turned away, saying something to the sobbing woman before steering her into the house. Several children followed. A door of leather stretched on a frame swung closed behind them, then shuddered slightly as the bottom corner struck the end of a rut worn into the hard-packed dirt.

  “I haven’t forgotten that.”

  Ren snorted. “Says the guy who spent his free hours at the academy hunting hares for the destitute. Don’t give me that. You see suffering, and it’s like… I don’t know, man. There’s some kind of lever in you that gets thrown, and it shuts down any kind of common sense in that head of yours. I know how this is going to end. You’re going to start feeling sorry for these people and their poor, sick dragons, and you are going to stick your neck out for them at some point. It’s going to be either Ander or me who has to rescue you before your head ends up rolling around at your feet.”

  “Not this time,” Tyber said. “I have some pretty vivid reminders.” He gingerly touched the puffy, sore flesh around his eye.

  “You say that, but I don’t believe you. Your own pain is temporary. That eye will heal right up. But the dragons will still be sick, and these people will still be around us all shocked at the way things turned out and sore because Sirvon has been relieved of the need to seek employment. You’ll feel their suffering. And that’s what gets you everytime. You feel everything so much. And you need to stop that. It’s going to get you killed, and worse than that, it’s going to get me killed. Me and Ander.”

  Tyber looked at the yawning, cool mouth of the weyr and the darkness inside. “You didn’t have to keep taking the silver. You could have walked away from the academy at any time before graduation.”

  “Like broken feathers,” Ren said. “If I would have walked away, who would be around to save your butt?”

  “I don’t need saving. As I recall, it was me who pulled you out of that ravine while you were drowning.”

  Ren grasped Tyber’s arm and spun him around so they were face-to-face.

  “Tyber,” Ren said, “I’m dead serious here. You’ve seen that guy. The Shepherd. We’re not out here to nab a man who’s evading his taxes. He orders men killed for disappointing him. He’s bad news. A menace and a danger to the kingdom. We have to stop him.”

  Tyber nodded, his brow growing heavy with confusion. “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  “Just keep it in mind. Remember that. These people are dragonjacks. They will leave your guts on your shoes if they suspect who you really are. We have to play our part. Not one of them tried to stop The Shepherd. None of them tried to keep Sirvon’s throat intact. These are the kind of people we are dealing with. You have to pretend to be one of them. That means the nice guy routine needs to be locked away in that root cellar. Better yet, it should have been left back in Aerona.”

  “I know that,” Tyber said, then looked over Ren’s head at the sound of jangling metal. The horses were turning, swinging away from the house and starting toward the road at a trot. The Shepherd looked at them as he went, then lifted his palm in a farewell.

  Ander nodded, then turned toward the boys.

  “All right,” Ren said as he turned back to Tyber. “I’m going to have to trust you on that for now, but if I ever come up and sock you in the gut, then that’s why. I just saw you risk our lives with your gullibility and naivety.”

  Tyber shook his head. “For Fang.”

  Ren stared him in the eye for a second, then nodded once. “That’s right. For Fang. You remember that. You remember that every time you open your mouth around one of these people. You do that, and the three of us might just live long enough to do the King’s bidding.”

  Ander walked past them without a word or a glance.

  Tyber looked back to Ren once, then followed Ander into the shadows. He stopped at the opening of the weyr. The heat of the sun dissipated from his head and shoulders. The scent of hot dust fell away to the cool, sour smell of the weyr. As his eyes adjusted, he found Rius standing alongside a wall, staring at him, Maybelle on one side and another dragon on the other side. They were so close together that one couldn’t spread her wings even halfway without striking the others.

  The urge came on him to take Rius out of the weyr now, to saddle her up, climb on, and take off. Fly off into the sky. And if she followed the road, she’d quickly come across The Shepherd and his guards. If they knew the signal language, he could signal to them that he had a message. Then co
me in low, and at the last second, give Rius the order for firebreath.

  And that would be the end of The Shepherd. Even if the guards managed to draw arrows on him and Rius, they’d be unlikely to get a clear shot. Their horses would scatter in fright.

  A smile came across Tyber’s face as he pictured it.

  Ren was worried about nothing.

  But the King wanted The Shepherd alive. And so there’d be no point in bringing it up to Ander. Instead, Tyber untied Rius and led her toward the opening of the weyr. There, he began a real inspection of her, passing over every inch, every scale, his hands constantly touching her, assuring himself that she was fine. As he looked for signs of neglect, he held back a growing fear that with each new part of her he examined, he’d find a tiny trail of dampness drying on a scale.

  But whatever had caused the sickness in the other dragons didn’t appear to have affected Rius. She was in perfect shape, if a little dusty about her claws and lower legs.

  “You need a good brushing,” Tyber said, then pulled her brush from the saddlebags heaped against the wall of the weyr, and from there, he sat before his dragon, picked up one of her foreclaws, placed it in his lap, and began to brush at the scales.

  He’d moved on to Rius’ fourth leg by the time the dragonjacks reappeared. A few of them came around the corner, including Halton.

  “Sirvon has been buried,” Halton said, his face turning slowly from side to side as if searching for the person he was addressing. “The others went to the house to rest and eat.”

  He looked at Tyber, then back into the shadows. “If that’s all right with you.”

  “That’s fine,” Ander called from back in the darkness. A lantern glowed in the corner of the weyr where Verana’s stall sat, but Ander himself wasn’t visible. “Do what you need to.”

  Halton stared into the corner a few seconds more, then looked at Tyber again. His eyes scanned Rius. He took a deep breath, then slowly approached. A sweat stain marred the chest of his shirt.

  “How is she?” Halton asked as he looked up at the blue dragon.

  “Fine. A little dusty around the claws, but I took care of that,” Tyber said as he turned his attention back to Rius’ foot. He filled his thoughts of what it had been like to bury Fang, to find stones among the grass and carry them back to the body. They had built a cairn so large that it could be seen from the road. These men hadn’t been gone long enough to do much of anything for Sirvon.

  “Any sign of…” Halton didn’t finish his statement.

  “Fine. Why?” Tyber looked up to Halton.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was just sort of hoping that… Well, it’s just that Pendro was the worst off. And she was the first to get sick. And she was the alpha and all. And I know the dragons are all supposed to be sort of interconnected in a way. And so I was thinking that maybe since Pendro had died…”

  Halton gestured vaguely at Verana’s stall.

  “I don’t know about that,” Tyber said as he returned his attention to Rius’ foot. He drew the brush back and forth across her scales, the whisking sound competing with the clicking and burring of grasshoppers out making the most of the unusually warm afternoon.

  “Look,” Halton said. “I’m sorry. About the eye.”

  Tyber raised his face to him.

  “I was… I thought you…” Halton looked away, squinting at the grasses and the blue sky that stretched off toward some sea that was supposed to be in the north. A breeze rattled the grasses and the grasshoppers grew still, quiet for a moment.

  Tyber turned his attention back to the scales, filled his mind with the sight of Fang limp across the back of Emmah’s saddle.

  “Did you know what you were doing?” Halton asked. “When I took you to Koff’s cottage?”

  Tyber continued to brush at the scales. “I did the best I could. I’m not a dragon healer. I wanted to help, but they’re too… There’s nothing I can do.”

  “But you did attend the academy, right?” Halton asked.

  “What’s it matter?”

  “Is there anything else you might be able to do for Gurvi? For the others? I don’t mean like mixing up compounds or salves or anything, but is there something else we can do for them?”

  Tyber set the brush aside and leaned back onto his palm. Rius looked at him with open impatience. He sat back up, lifted her rear foot off his lap, and set it before himself. He patted her tail. “I think that’s good enough for now.”

  Rius immediately laid down with a huff. Her tail shoved at Tyber’s hip as she looked out across the plains.

  “You might want to get them outside,” Tyber said, leaning back on his palm again and looking up to Halton. “The air and the sun will probably do them good. Dry up those wounds.”

  Halton looked across the weyr, to where Gurvi stood packed beside the other dragons. She stared back at him.

  “Sirvon wouldn’t let us,” Halton said as he looked on to Verana’s stall. “He was afraid that they’d be spotted by hordesmen.”

  Tyber looked out to the grasses and the sky, the blue deep above but fading to a lighter shade near the horizon. It was the kind of day where the dragons would just hang in the sky, with the air shifting around them. A good day for flying. But he hadn’t seen dragons other than these since he left Aerona.

  “Ask Ander,” Tyber finally said.

  “You think he’d say yes?”

  Tyber looked up at Halton and found himself caught off guard by the man’s look of hopefulness mixed with fear. He could nearly see the strain in his posture that kept him from jogging back to Verana’s stall.

  For all the sky, this was ridiculous. Yes, they were thieves and murderers like Ren had said, but the dragons were just dragons. And they were sick and needed help. A lot more help than Tyber could manage. They needed a dragon healer. Or the dragon queen.

  He looked from Halton to Rius.

  If Trysten could look at Rius and tell Tyber what the dragon was thinking, that she adored him, and that Maybelle was getting used to Ren, then couldn’t she just look at these sorry, bedraggled and weeping dragons and tell Zet or one of the other healers what to do? How to fix this mess? Surely the dragon healers in charge of the largest swell in the kingdom would have everything they needed, everything that existed to treat a sick dragon.

  If only he could get the horde to Aerona.

  He sat up and looked into the shadows, searching for Ren as if he were about to barrel toward Tyber now, fist clenched and cocked and ready to make good on his threat to deck Tyber for forgetting Fang. Even for a second.

  Tyber picked up his brush and pushed himself to his feet.

  Halton looked at him with expectation, his eyebrow raised. Did he think that Tyber was going to ask Ander on his behalf? As if Ander was a temperamental and strict father?

  He turned his back on Halton and walked away to put Rius’ brush back in the saddlebag.

  Getting the dragons to Aerona wasn’t far-fetched or unreasonable. They were bonded to Verana. Once they had The Shepherd in custody, they would have to deal with the inconvenient fact that a dragon of the King’s hordes was bonded to a horde of sickly rogue dragons.

  As Tyber dug through the saddlebag, Halton proceeded back toward Verana’s stall.

  Chapter 19

  After the dragons were fed the following morning, Ander whistled to gather everyone’s attention.

  “Saddle up your dragons, men. We’re going for a flight.”

  The dragonjacks stared at him, then looked at Brath. The commander made a show of not responding, standing before a bucket of water and slowly scrubbing his hands clean of the raw meat.

  Tyber crossed the weyr for Rius’ saddle. Ren went for Maybelle’s. The others watched.

  “Now, men,” Ander ordered, stepping into the middle of the cramped, dark weyr. “The Shepherd said he’d be sending his men around to check on us. He will find that I’m taking this very seriously. I want to see if the lot of you can fly a formation at all.”
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  As Tyber returned with the saddle, Rius lowered herself to her elbows and belly, dipping her head and extending her neck. Halton, who had been cleaning Gurvi’s mouth with a rag, watched as Tyber settled the saddle on Rius’ shoulders. She stood immediately, impatient to take the sky.

  Tyber looked at Halton, but the man’s expression was hidden in shadow. As Tyber crouched to grasp the dangling straps of his saddle, Halton moved toward the back wall. He stopped before a crate. Leather creaked and buckles jangled as he pulled his own tack out and carried it back to Gurvi.

  Soon, buckles jangled around the weyr as the other dragonjacks followed Halton’s lead.

  As Tyber completed a final inspection of the buckles, Myler, one of the dragonjacks, dropped his tack to the ground. He examined his dragon’s shoulder carefully, then called for a lantern. A weyrboy brought it to him, and several other dragonjacks gathered around. They studied the dragon.

  Myler lowered his head, his shoulders drooping.

  “Problem?” Ander called from Verana’s stall.

  Myler went back to Ander and explained something quickly in hushed tones. Ander came out and took a look himself, peering at the dragon’s shoulder. He touched his fingertips to her scales, then examined the tips of his fingers and brought them up to his nose.

  He shook his head.

  Tyber started across the narrow aisle.

  Ander looked up. His gaze stopped Tyber on the spot. Tyber returned to Rius, making a show of examining her tack once more.

  “Sit this one out,” Ander said to Myler. “Keep an eye on her. Let me know if she gets worse.”

  Myler nodded, then stood there, hands on his hips, staring at the dragon’s shoulder as Ander returned to Verana’s stall. Another rider called to the weyrboy, and off he went with the lantern, leaving Myler and his afflicted dragon in the shadows again.

  Tyber took a deep breath and surveyed Rius as best as he could. The darkness in the weyr wracked his nerves. He expected to find lesions settled on Rius’ scales like a cloud of flies every time they stepped outside into the light.