Meghan's Dragon

by E. M. Foner

  “Did you think they laid eggs?” Meghan laughed out loud. “That’s why there are so few dragons around. That and the fact that the males fight over the females, and the females fight over hoards. All of the original dragons date back to when your world gave up its magic. A group of the most powerful mages who wouldn’t give up their powers left Dark Earth and came here. To prevent those who remained behind from profiting on the treasure they couldn’t bring with them, they caused the magical land they inhabited to sink into the sea. There’s a play about it that gets performed in Old Land, but the staging is too complicated for the traveling troupes.”

  “So the mages from Dark Earth came here and created dragons?”

  “They came here and became dragons. Didn’t you see Shorinth? As large as his wings are and as strong as I’m sure he is, a creature like him could never fly without magic. If dragons were wholly dependent on their wings to stay in the air, they’d be flapping like bumblebees.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Bryan allowed. “So you’re saying that all the dragons around today are descended from Dark Earth mages?”

  “A few of the oldest actually are Dark Earth mages, but they tend to lose interest in human matters after such a long time in dragon form. What I didn’t know until Shorinth let it slip is that they’ve lost the ability to bring new dragons from Dark Earth. I shouldn’t be surprised, since dragons are so private, and whatever scrolls they might have recorded while in human form didn’t end up in my baron’s collection.”

  “But you figured out how to reach Dark Earth and pull me through.”

  “I explained how I figured it out, and I don’t know for sure if I could repeat it with anybody else,” Meghan said. “It took a lot of energy, and if you hadn’t grabbed my hand, I don’t know what would have happened. Maybe a dragon has to be in human form to open the passage to Dark Earth. There are few dragons young enough to have any human time left, and maybe that’s not how they want to spend it.”

  “So now you want me to crawl into this mound of silk and flap my arms like an idiot.” Bryan rolled his tongue around the inside of his cheek, considering the idea, and then asked, “What are you going to do for me?”

  “I bring you extra food all the time, and I’ve let you keep my share of our tips, which ended up on a string around your neck,” Meghan pointed out. “What else do you want?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said about us being with each other like husband and wife, and it doesn’t make sense,” Bryan replied, stepping closer to the girl. “If our magical energy is going to average out, it means that one of us will become stronger. You keep telling me that you’ve never heard of anybody learning to channel their magic as fast as I have, and I’m better than you at most of the things you’ve taught me. If I’m stronger than you, it means you’ll be taking from me, and I’m cool with that. And if I’m wrong and it’s the other way around, maybe that extra boost you can give me is just what I need to become a real dragon.”

  Meghan backed away. She recognized the green flames dancing in his eyes as a sign that he wasn’t entirely in control of himself. Sneaking away from the camp to a field of clover to lay out the silk dragon suit for Bryan to crawl into suddenly seemed like a bad idea. “Maybe we should just go back,” Meghan suggested uncertainly.

  “For all your talk about our future together, you don’t care as much about me as I do about you. Maybe you’d be happy if we spent the rest of our lives as best friends sharing a tent, but I’m going crazy here, and it’s your fault.”

  “Hadrixia warned me that all boys say that,” Meghan retorted, but her voice sounded weak to her, and she felt her pulse racing at more than twice its usual pace.

  “I’m not a boy, I’m a man,” Bryan grated out in a low voice. “I’d be a man who’s killed other men if you didn’t keep stopping me. I’ll put on the dragon nightgown and dance around like a clown if that’s what you really want, but first I need to hear you say that when this quest is over, you’ll be mine for real. No more acting.”

  Meghan swallowed dryly and suddenly found herself falling backwards, thanks to placing a foot in the burrow of some small mammal. Bryan grabbed her shoulders and pulled her upright before her own reactions could even kick in to brace her for the fall. He held her so tightly that she thought he would crush her, and if she had moved her head forward just a hair, their noses would have been touching.

  “Deal,” he demanded rather than asked.

  “Deal,” she whispered back, closing her eyes against the brilliant green flames dancing in his pupils. Her heart pounded in her chest and the blood rushed in her ears, drowning out the night sounds of the meadow. Then she suddenly realized that she was standing on her own feet again and that Bryan had released her. She touched her lips and wondered if she had imagined the kiss.

  When Meghan finally opened her eyes, a monstrous white shape was moving to engulf her, and she instinctively reached for her pendant to call upon her magical reserves. Then she heard Bryan’s muffled voice from within the mass of swirling silk and came back to her senses.

  “Get me out of this thing. I can’t find the right opening and this stuff keeps wrapping itself tighter.”

  “Stop struggling,” she called back. “It must be magically form-fitting and it’s trying to shrink down to your size.”

  Bryan stood still for a moment, but the wind was picking up and the silk wings of the garment streamed out behind him. It was enough to pull him off balance, and he fell with a thud.

  “Get it off of me or I’m going to start burning holes,” he shouted.

  “Don’t! You’ll burn yourself if the silk catches fire. Just lie still and I’ll get you out of there.”

  Meghan snatched at handfuls of the heavy silk wrapped around Bryan, searching for the hole intended for the dragon’s head and neck. The silk had thickened as the garment resized itself to human form, and she supposed the wings might have done the same if he had ever gotten his arms through those slits. Finally her hand worked its way into an opening in the silk, allowing her to root around inside until she found his face.

  “Hey, stop poking me,” he complained in a muffled voice. Meghan began to use her other hand to roll the silk down her arm, effectively bringing the opening towards his head. “And hurry up, I’m sweating buckets in this thing.”

  “Stretch,” Meghan muttered under her breath, hoping that the same magic that controlled her native-produced moccasins was in play here. The silk seemed to resist her at first, but then the hole began to grow, and Bryan quickly squirmed out.

  “I had just found the wing holes and was beginning to flap my arms when the extra silk I was standing on pulled my feet out from under me and began tightening around my legs,” he complained. “I pulled my arms out of the wing openings to try to get my legs free, but instead the stupid silk bound them against my sides. I think it’s some kind of weird dragon restraint device,” he added, kicking the now quiescent mound of silk. “Where were you all that time I was struggling?”

  “I was right here, watching,” Meghan said, too embarrassed to admit that she thought they’d been kissing the whole time. “I thought you were, like, making progress.”

  Chapter 68

  Bryan jogged up to the front of the wagon train and asked Theodric, “Why are we stopping?”

  “Hill is too steep for the horses to haul up the wagon carrying the stage timbers without risking that they hurt themselves. We’ll unhook the team from the kitchen wagon and double up, though it means a late supper.”

  “They need the horses to cook?”

  Rowan erupted in laughter, and he thumped Bryan on the back hard enough to make the young man stagger. “You should be on stage,” he said. “I’m getting an idea for a new sort of play, without a script. We’ll just put you up there and you can ask the audience members questions about how they live. Do they need the horses to cook—I’ve never heard anything so funny.”

  Bryan laughed along with the others this time, hopi
ng to pass his question off as an intentional joke. He hadn’t really thought that the horses contributed to the food preparation, but the question had come reflexively. It seemed to him that Hadrixia’s translation magic had interfered with his internal filter that prevented every thought from being spoken, but as Meghan pointed out, the healer hadn’t charged for her services.

  “Doubling the teams to haul the wagons uphill more than triples the travel time. The horses have to return to haul the next wagon, and there’s plenty of harness fiddling involved,” Theodric explained. “Give me a hand with the changeover and you’ll learn something.”

  “Is it just the wagon with the stage that’s too heavy?” Bryan asked. “Couldn’t a bunch of us just help push it along from behind? Maybe Storm Bringer could add a tail wind.”

  “Now there’s an original idea,” Rowan said. “It would save a lot of time if it works, and I do like keeping a schedule on the road. How about it, Theodric? The three of us should be able to take the strain off the horses.”

  Theodric gave Rowan a close look, shrugged, and took his place at the back corner of the wagon. Bryan took the middle spot for himself to prove that he was no shirker, and the giant leader of the players took the other corner. Somebody signaled the teamster to start the horses, and the men leaned into the wagon. It lurched into motion, and thanks to the extra manpower combined with the fact that the road was just starting to become steeper, the wagon soon reached the regular walking speed of the draft horses.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Bryan huffed, straining every muscle in his body. He tried to remember what Meghan had taught him about magical strengthening techniques and realized that he hadn’t been paying attention. “You guys alright?”

  “Oh, we’re just fine,” Rowan assured him. “I’ve been pushing wagons out of mud holes and snowdrifts since I was ten, though it never occurred to me to try this before. Good workout for the legs.”

  The hill seemed to stretch on forever, and Bryan’s mind went blank as he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the next. He closed his eyes as he pushed, and he thought he heard Meghan starting to say something, but Rowan broke out in an old work song, and the others joined in, drowning her out.

  Finally the pushing got much easier and he heard the teamster shouting, so he opened his eyes to see that they were starting down the other side of the hill. Rowan and Theodric were sitting on the tailboard of the wagon, sipping beer and watching him in amusement.

  “When did you guys stop pushing?” Bryan demanded.

  “Before they started singing,” Meghan told him angrily. She looked all red and flustered, and Bryan realized that the other women had been holding her back as they all walked along to watch him push a wagon up the hill. “Even the horses were slacking off and taking a break.”

  “Best example of strengthening magic I’ve seen in a while,” Laitz commented. “If you don’t want to do the one-man comedy play, you should consider a strongman act.”

  “I never learned any strengthening magic,” Bryan admitted, out of breath and hungry, but otherwise no worse for the wear.

  The nearby players who overheard the conversation stopped walking and stared.

  “You called on that power without trying to?” Meghan asked. “No man could have kept that wagon moving without magic. The horses really did stop pulling near the end.”

  “I guess I just have a lot of excess energy lately,” Bryan said.

  “You’re so lucky,” one of the older women told Meghan. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  “It’s said that if newlyweds put a copper in a purse each time they lay together, and then take one out for each time after their first year of marriage, the purse will never be empty,” Faye observed to the general amusement of all.

  Meghan turned bright red and fled back towards the props wagon.

  Bryan shook his head in disgust and muttered, “What a rip-off.”

  Chapter 69

  At the communal supper, Rowan announced, “We’re here a day early, thanks in no small part to the efforts of our young friend.” He indicated Bryan with one beefy hand.

  “Way to push a wagon, boy,” Simon called out.

  “You made the poor horses nervous about their job security,” Jomar added. “They practically trotted the rest of the way.”

  “The horses have seen him eat and they were worried about the grain running out,” somebody else contributed.

  Bryan scowled and reached for a turkey drumstick on the latest tray deposited by the boy working as the kitchen wagon runner. His twist-and-yank method failed to separate the joint, and the whole bird slid across the table, bringing a new wave of laughter and comments from the players.

  “Don’t make fun of him,” Hardol remonstrated the others. “A growing boy has to eat.”

  “We’ll set the stage in the morning, but the performances won’t start until the day after, so everybody is welcome to take the afternoon off and visit the attractions,” Rowan continued with his announcement. “I understand that some of the vendors who keep booths on the fairgrounds actually raise their prices once the festivities start, so this may be our year to find some bargains.”

  “What’s so special about the shopping here?” Meghan asked Faye. Simon’s wife often sat next to the girl at meals in order to pepper her with questions about the healing techniques she had seen.

  “The merchants around the port here specialize in importing the latest fashions from Old Land. They get a whole shipload of new styles every year, and there are thousands of local women who earn a good living making copies. I don’t know of anywhere else in New Land where the production of clothing is so advanced.”

  Bryan leaned around Meghan and asked, “They have factories? I thought mass production wasn’t possible here.”

  “Mass production, that’s an interesting way to describe it,” Faye replied. “The way it was explained to me, a merchant will purchase enough cloth to make a large number of garments and then buy examples of the new fashions. An expert seamstress carefully cuts all of the stitching out of the new garment and makes a drawing of how the pieces fit together.”

  “So a woman can borrow the pieces as a pattern to make a new dress and use the drawing to put them together,” Meghan concluded. “What a great idea.”

  “It’s more advanced than that,” Faye said. “There are some large sheds down near the wharf with hundreds of women and girls working in each one. They sit at long tables, each of them doing a single task, like cutting the same piece or stitching a particular seam, and then they pass it on to the next person. Within a day of the ship arriving, the markets are flooded with the latest fashions.”

  “But then they’re copies,” Bryan objected.

  “What’s the difference?” Meghan asked.

  “Well, if you could buy the original or a copy, wouldn’t you pay more for the original?”

  “But the original has been taken apart and handled by all of the seamstresses. I’d pay more for a new one.”

  “You don’t get it. I mean, if you could have an original, wouldn’t you prefer that over a copy?”

  “How could there be copies if the original wasn’t taken apart?”

  “A different original. There can’t be a whole shipload of unique new dresses.”

  “Well, if the new fashions are already copies, what difference does it make?”

  “But the clothes from Old Land are original copies,” Bryan insisted. “Get it? Like, people would see you and think that you’re really sophisticated because you’re wearing new Old Land clothes.”

  “Either something is original or it’s a copy,” Meghan replied, unable to follow Bryan’s line of reasoning. “What difference does it make if it’s copied here or copied on the other side of the ocean?”

  “One is original and the other is pirated!”

  “You think that pirates are interested in fashion?” Meghan asked. “I’ve always heard that they wear whatever they can steal. That’s how you can tell them f
rom regular sailors.”

  “Never mind,” Bryan muttered, turning his attention back to the food.

  Chapter 70

  “Step right up, the next contest begins in ten minutes. Win a cup of coppers or a stuffed dragon for your sweetheart back home. How about you, sir? With those long legs, the prize is as good as yours.”

  “What’s the deal?” Bryan asked the barker, ignoring Meghan’s attempts to pull him away.

  “Just two coppers to participate. First place winner takes all the money in the goblet, second place gets the stuffed dragon, third place gets free entry into the next contest.”

  “How much is in the goblet?”

  “Well, that’s anybody’s guess, but you can see for yourself that it’s full.”

  “And how many men are running?”

  “I see we have a regular money counter on our hands here,” the barker replied, using a magic assist to raise his voice even further to try to create interest with passersby. “There aren’t nearly as many men today as we’ll get starting tomorrow, when the fair is in full swing.”

  “But how many?” Bryan insisted, eyeing the goblet.

  “You only have to look at the starting line. Early birds get the best position.”

  “There must be a hundred men there already,” Meghan whispered to Bryan doubtfully. “They all look like runners, do you see how skinny they are? And I doubt there are even a hundred coppers in that narrow goblet. It’s like he’s taking half of the money for the privilege of letting the men run around a horse track.”

  “It’ll be a piece of cake. You saw me push the wagon.”

  “There’s strength and there’s speed. You’ve proven that you’re strong, but for all we know that’s making you slower. All of those men will be using magic to make themselves faster.”

  “It’s just two coppers to try,” Bryan cajoled.

  “My two coppers, because you turned all of our earnings into that little gold ring!”