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

by Vickie Knestaut

Brath nodded. “Trouble with him again?”

  “Unfortunately,” The Shepherd said with a shake of his head, then looked back to Ander. “Brath can show you the way. Storbin is a goatherd that lives a small distance from here. He owes me several payments. You will proceed to his home and collect those payments.”

  “Any particular amount?” Ander asked.

  The Shepherd smiled and nodded once. “I appreciate your sense of humor, Ander. Yes, enough. Enough will be the appropriate amount. Collect it and leave no doubt in his mind that it’s cheaper to pay what he owes than to plead like a pauper.”

  Tyber’s eyes widened. He glanced at Ren, who only stared at The Shepherd with no expression on his face.

  Surely Ander wouldn’t go along with this.

  “It will be done,” Ander said.

  Tyber looked back to Ander, but the dragoneer kept his stance, his arms folded behind his back, his chin lifted to hold the gaze of The Shepherd still in his saddle. For all the sky, he looked very much like he meant it.

  “There is one thing, though, if I may trouble you,” Ander said.

  The Shepherd looked to the weyr. He swung his leg over the saddle and stepped down before handing the reins off to Ricard.

  “Oh, that ridiculous thing!” The Shepherd cried, then walked across the yard, meeting Halton and Sanda halfway. He circled the dragon, examining her mended wing.

  “Pull that out for me,” he said to Halton. “Let me get a good look.”

  Myler ran forward to do his bidding while Tyber tried to catch Ander’s eye, but Ander wouldn’t take his attention from The Shepherd.

  “Oh my!” The Shepherd called as Myler spread the wing open. “That’s really quite some work. Who did this?”

  He looked at the dragonjacks as he pointed at the stitchwork.

  “Tyber,” Brath said.

  “Tyber? Aren’t you the one that killed Pendro with your goo?”

  Tyber shook his head. “I didn’t kill her. She was sick.”

  The Shepherd grinned and looked back to the stitches. He shook his head. “You really fancy yourself a dragon healer, don’t you?”

  “She was hurt. I did what I could.”

  The Shepherd touched one of the small, tight X’s, poked at it with his finger. “I’ve heard that hordesmen do this to their dragons. It aids in the healing of their wings, doesn’t it?”

  Tyber nodded. “They taught us at the academy.”

  The Shepherd sighed, then looked up to Sanda’s face as she watched him. “Such a shame. That you wasted your efforts and fine thread here on such a hopeless cause.”

  Tyber stepped forward.

  “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about,” Ander said as he stepped forward, cutting in front of Tyber. “The rot is getting worse. We’re going to start losing dragons at a pretty good pace if something isn’t done.”

  “Oh?” The Shepherd asked. “And what are you going to do about it?”

  Ander froze as if caught off guard. He recovered quickly and said, “I know some people who might be able to help. I don’t have many family members left in good standing, but there is still a person or two at the academy who would remember me, who would be willing to do me a favor. Especially if I tell them it is for the dragons. The dragon healer there, Master Gury, is an old fool with a soft spot for these beasts. He might be persuaded into mixing up a salve or some other preparation to help.”

  The Shepherd tossed his head back and laughed heartily. “Your sense of humor, Ander,” he said as he wagged a finger at him. “It takes some getting used to. So let me assure you that if you go anywhere near the mother city, or so much as send someone with word to the mother city, you will die long before this Master Gury can give you a response.”

  The Shepherd turned his face to Tyber. “Tyber, what can you do?”

  “Me?” Tyber asked, placing his palm over his chest.

  The Shepherd gestured at Sanda. “You’re the one who knows more than anyone else. How are you going to fix this?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”

  “A shame,” The Shepherd said, looking back to Sanda’s face, then stepping back and looking her over once again. “Well, it seems then that this beast has outlived its usefulness.”

  He turned to Brath. “And so why haven’t you slaughtered it yet?”

  “It was my decision,” Ander said, stepping forward. “I want to find a way to save the dragons.”

  “Then do it,” The Shepherd said, his face growing hard and tinged with annoyance. “But until you can, I will not have you wasting food on useless, rotting carcasses.”

  He turned to Ricard. “Finish her. But do keep in mind the children.”

  Ricard nodded and began to dismount.

  “No!” Tyber said, pushing past Ander. “You can’t.”

  “What? I can’t?” The Shepherd asked, his face breaking into a broad, amused grin.

  “No,” Tyber said, shaking his head. “You can’t kill her. You have to give me a chance. I can find a way to cure her. Just give me some time.”

  The Shepherd’s head moved back on his neck as if he were surprised.

  “Time?”

  Tyber gestured at Sanda. “You can’t do this! You can’t kill her just because she can’t fly. These other dragons are sick, too, and if you keep killing all of them, you won’t have any dragons left!”

  The look on The Shepherd’s face collapsed into one of cold ire, and the chill swept through Tyber. He froze, and he could no longer speak. He’d gone too far. Too far, and now he and Rius would pay the cost.

  The Shepherd nodded once. “A dragon dies, I have no use for its rider. Is that clear?”

  Tyber swallowed. He couldn’t quite nod.

  “Fortunately for you,” The Shepherd went on, “I believe you have just enough smarts to make yourself useful. You might even come through and find a way to treat these rotting bags of meat. But…”

  The Shepherd wagged his finger at Tyber. “But that mouth needs adjusted first.”

  He nodded off to Tyber’s right. As Tyber spun to see what The Shepherd had nodded at, he found Ricard’s fist. It crashed into his jaw, snapping his head around so that pain exploded through his neck. The world tilted on its side, and Tyber fell through it all, landing in some place dark.

  Chapter 23

  Pain woke Tyber. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like an iron bar. The sun was hot on his face.

  A hand touched his shoulder.

  “Tyber?” Ren asked.

  Tyber opened his eyes and found the hard-packed ground stretched out before him, the shadow of the weyr and the dark opening beyond. The folds of a pale blue skirt sat just at the edge of his vision.

  “Still with us, man?” Ren pressed.

  Tyber cricked his neck back enough to see more of the skirt. He twisted his head to squint up at the woman crouched beside him. She studied him with a look of concern and disgust mashed together.

  His mouth throbbed.

  “Rius?” Tyber asked as he struggled to push himself up on his elbow. His lips felt funny. His tongue discovered a hole where a tooth used to be. Blood was everywhere in his mouth, thick and metallic. He had to spit, but didn’t want to. Not in front of the woman.

  “She’s fine,” Ren said. “Though I was a little worried about her there for a few seconds.”

  Tyber whipped his head around to Ren, crouching at his other side.

  “I thought she might be in need of a new rider,” Ren said with a nod. “But it looks like you’re going to pull through.”

  “What happened?” Tyber asked. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and looked around. There was no sign of The Shepherd or his horses and men.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Boots whispered against the dry dirt. Ander emerged from the shadows. A streak of blood marred the leg of his trousers.

  “On your feet,” he said, his voice hard, full of the command he’d wielded a
t the academy. He didn’t say it, but the word hordesman hung in the air.

  Tyber struggled to his feet. Ren grasped his upper arm and yanked him up the last few inches and held him as Tyber swayed, the too-bright landscape around him gently bucking to and fro as if rocking on a firm wind.

  When the dizziness passed, Tyber cast his gaze to the ground where he’d fallen. A damp pool sat dark against the light-colored ground, a tooth in the middle of it.

  Ander’s boots stopped several feet from the tooth.

  “You, get back to the house,” he said to the woman. “Ren, go help the others.”

  The air stirred as the woman passed behind Tyber. Ren walked slowly toward the weyr, casting a concerned look over his shoulder before disappearing into the shadows.

  “Rius?” Tyber asked. It felt like he had too much in his mouth to handle a full sentence.

  “You are wild-well lucky that Ricard didn’t kill you.”

  Tyber nodded his agreement. Ander’s avoidance of his question was answer enough. He wouldn’t do that to Tyber. Rius was fine.

  “I’m not even going to ask what it was you were thinking,” Ander went on, his voice low, “because it was plain to see. I can completely understand why you were chosen for this. No one could believe you are a hordesman.”

  Tyber tried to swallow, but there was too much in his mouth. He turned his head and spat. A bloody glob of splashed across the bright dirt.

  “I don’t feel so lucky,” he said, and it felt like the hole where his tooth had been was wider than his head and filled to the brim with throbbing pain.

  “You almost got yourself killed. Do you understand who we are dealing with?”

  “I do,” Tyber said.

  Ander pointed back to the weyr. “The others are in there making a litter for Sanda. She’s dead.”

  Tyber clenched his eyes shut. It felt like there was nowhere he could hide from the light of this day, the brightness of the sun, as if it would hound him forever and follow him even to his cairn.

  “Ricard slit her throat,” Ander said, and now his voice was harder, firmer, and loud enough for anyone to hear.

  “You wear every emotion on your sleeve,” Ander continued as Tyber held his eyes shut. “You wear it on your face. One only has to look at you to know what you truly feel about anything.”

  Tyber nodded.

  “It makes you a terrible liar, and yet a brilliant one at the same time.”

  Tyber squinted through his eyelids. Just enough to see the blurry form of Ander as he took a step closer and dropped his voice again.

  “We have a mission to complete. We will do The Shepherd’s bidding. You won’t be happy about it, and I imagine you will fret and lose sleep over it.”

  Tyber’s jaw tightened, and it eased the pain some, so he clamped down even tighter. His tongue felt trapped in his mouth like a sluggish, bloated animal.

  “We will earn The Shepherd’s trust. We will earn the trust of the other dragonjacks. I will then find a reason to send you out. Supplies or something. You will bring back reinforcements.”

  Tyber nodded. It seemed too simple. How would they actually get The Shepherd though? They knew who he was, but they didn’t know where to find him when he wasn’t in sight.

  “In the meantime, you will continue to play your part. And you will do it with a little more care. The Shepherd is tolerating me only because I’m the dragoneer, but at the rate we are losing dragons, my title isn’t going to protect us for long.”

  “If we got them back to Aerona...” Tyber started, his words terribly slurred. He turned his head and spat again.

  “We are not here to save dragons,” Ander said, shaking his head. “Keep your priorities straight, Tyber. It’s when you forget what your mission is that you end up getting killed, or at least violently losing your teeth. We are here to remove the enemies of the King. Don’t forget that.”

  Tyber started to point out that he was talking about the King’s dragons, but then let it go. He swallowed, nodded, and braced himself against a wave of nausea as the bloody spit hit his stomach. Embarrassment rose through him. He looked away, and his eyes could not find any relief without looking back to the shadows that hid the body of Sanda.

  How wild small and useless they were here. All of that training. Hailed as heroes in the mother city for safeguarding the caravan. But now they were trapped, forced to behave like thugs in order to save their own sorry necks.

  “Tyber,” Ander said.

  He turned back to the dragoneer.

  “Go. Help the others bury Sanda.”

  Tyber would have sneered if his mouth would have allowed it. “To gain their trust?”

  “No,” Ander said with a shake of his head. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Ander started back for the weyr and left Tyber beneath the sun to struggle with an urge to laugh bitterly. The right thing to do.

  He followed Ander into the weyr, and after his eyes adjusted, he helped feed poles under the lifeless body of Sanda and then lash them together. Finally, the dragonjacks lifted Sanda’s body from a wide, dark puddle. A thick cloud of flies buzzed around the dragon. One landed on Tyber’s lips, at the corner of his mouth, but he dared not let go of the pole he clutched. He tried to wipe his mouth on his shoulder, and that sent the fly buzzing off only to return as soon as his head grew still again. He gave up and held his lips clamped. The fly crawled across his mouth as they carried the dead dragon around to the back of the weyr.

  Brath motioned for them to set Sanda down on a wide, charred spot of ground. As soon as Tyber released the pole he’d been carrying, he swatted at the fly, and off it went, finding the wound at the base of Sanda’s neck to be of greater interest.

  They piled wood on the dragon. A fortune of wood. And when Ren asked Halton why they didn’t just bury her, Halton looked at him as if he were mad.

  “You can’t have cairns sitting out in the open,” Halton said, gesturing at the still grass, creaking and ticking with the business of grasshoppers. “We have to burn them. Then we can bury what’s left.”

  Brath walked around the pyre with a torch, touching it to oily rags. Tyber sat heavily on the ground, his back against the stone foundation of the weyr. One of the women approached and offered him a ladle full of water. He drank it, then drank several more before she moved off, her skirts swishing, her face tight, packed by grief into an expression as hard as the ground beneath them.

  The fire grew quickly, climbing over the planks. As the heat pressed against Tyber’s face and shoved the stench of burning meat at him, he pushed himself to his feet and started for the weyr entrance.

  Halton fell in beside him.

  “Thank you for your help,” Halton said. “You and Ren and Ander. We appreciate it.”

  Tyber uttered a dry, humorless laugh.

  “Especially,” Halton went on, “now that there’s only five of us left.”

  Tyber nodded. “It seems that we’re all in this together.”

  Halton said nothing more, but kept pace with Tyber as they walked alongside the weyr. As they rounded the corner, Halton stopped.

  “I was thinking about what you said.”

  Tyber paused and looked over his shoulder. Coolness bathed his face now, and the stench of charring meat was gone, leaving only the scents of woodsmoke and sweat, his unwashed body. Dust.

  “What I would do,” Halton said, then nodded at the weyr entrance. “To save Gurvi.”

  Tyber lifted an eyebrow. He turned to face Halton as his gut tightened.

  “You would do anything,” Halton said. “Whatever it took to save Rius.”

  Tyber nodded.

  Halton mimicked his gesture. “I would, too. Whatever it took.”

  He peered past Tyber, through the shadows, and on to the pool of dried blood and gory straw and the cloud of flies that wouldn’t leave until winter returned.

  “Gurvi deserves better,” Halton said. “Better than me. Better than this.”

  Ty
ber nodded again. What to do with what he’d just been handed? The urge to tell him about Aerona and the dragon queen and the healers that worked there all pushed at him. But the risk was too great. Right now.

  “Just so you know,” Halton said, then folded his arms before himself. “I wanted to tell you. Just so you’d know.”

  “Thanks,” Tyber said, his mouth sticky and dry. “Glad to hear it.”

  He turned to the shadows and slipped inside the weyr, eager to sit beside Rius and prop his aching back and throbbing head against her brilliant blue scales.

  Chapter 24

  From the front of the horde, Brath pointed to a low cottage in the grass.

  Tyber’s shoulders tightened as he stared at the building. It more closely resembled the root cellar back at the weyr than a proper cottage. The walls were made of stone and sod. It looked hardly large enough to stand in, but with grass growing across the roof of it, it was difficult to tell.

  In front of the cottage, a wide swath of grass was beaten down where a dozen goats grazed. But no one tended them.

  Brath and Ander traded positions, the dragoneer taking the point now that Brath had shown them the way. Tyber’s grip flexed on the saddle lip. He’d asked Halton what these trips were like. Halton had said that Storbin had failed to pay his due to The Shepherd and they were being sent to collect. They would take anything of value from the man, and if he gave them any trouble, they would give back twice as much.

  Ander signaled for the horde to go to ground and he pointed to a patch of tall grass next to the cottage. It was a good call. They’d have some cover if someone burst out of the cottage and loosed arrows at them.

  Tyber shook his head. This was unbelievable. After all they’d been through with the dragonjacks that had attacked the caravan, they were about to behave no better.

  He looked over his shoulder to Ren. His friend nodded once, then passed him the signal for good luck.

  Tyber turned away. Rius descended through the air. Ahead, the goats fled, leaping and running from them, scattering around the cottage and into the grass.

  Tyber took a deep breath. He watched the cottage door for movement. They had a task, and he needed to do it. This was how he protected Rius. This was what needed to be done.