Chapter 10: New Moon

We went down into the gorge at dusk the next day, all of us.

Me, Dorrit, the cook, the shepherd brothers and the smith's wife.

Bettris came, and sat on the rocks above in furs with her bow.

Wystan carried the firewood down on his back, three loads.

"A king," Dorrit said, watching him. "Carrying sticks."

"A king who'd like his supper hot," he said. "Make yourself useful and light that."

We built the fire right in front of the bars.

The three dragons inside watched us with their white eyes.

The elder's son was the black one, the biggest, at the back.

He'd chewed his foreleg to the bone in places.

He didn't come to the bars when we sang.

The other two were smaller.

A grey boy and a girl with a mottled green hide who liked to put her nose through the bars and huff at the cook.

"She likes you," the smith's wife told him.

"She likes the smell of mutton on me."

We sang in shifts all night.

The pot song, and their names over it, one after another.

At midnight the grey boy started rocking.

Back and forth, back and forth, his head swaying with the tune.

I nodded at Dorrit.

She went white.

"Me? On my own?"

"You did it on a glacier with my voice gone. You can do it by a fire with a bowl of soup."

"That was a fluke."

"Then fluke it again."

She went up to the bars.

She put her hands to her mouth.

She started off-key, the way she always did.

Then she found the tune, and sang the boy's name over it, steady as a bell.

The grey boy pushed his head against the bars toward her.

His eyes cleared.

He shrank down in the straw, a gangly naked boy of nineteen, crying with his face in his arms.

Keep reading free with an account. Start After My Husband Abandoned Me, I Rule All Dragons from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.