The Dragon and Her Boy Page 2

  * * *

  It was a beautiful afternoon. Cody sat atop a gray boulder as he blew his wooden flute. It was a new instrument. The lyre had been too troublesome to play while he recovered so he had taken up the flute instead. There was little else to do during the months he spent healing his concussion, his many fractured ribs, and a dislocated shoulder. At least he was decent at playing an instrument. His dog Twig wasn't wincing nearly so much at the occasional sour notes.

  After half an hour of sitting he was forced to stand and stretch. He suddenly stopped as his still-sensitive side twinged with pain, but he knew if he didn't move at least once in a while his muscles would stiffen and become even more pained.

  He was happy to tend the flock again, to his aging grandfather's great relief, and to be away from all the attention. Cody had become a bit of a celebrity in Hogswash. To his dismay, nobody cared that he had supposedly fought a dragon. Because all the township had ever talked about the last two months was how some rogue dragon landed in town carrying his unconscious body, releasing him unceremoniously on town square before it bounded off into the sky.

  Exciting things rarely happened in Hogswash, a community of farmers, herders, smiths and store owners. In fact, word of the incident had spread like wildfire throughout the entire Shire of Devon.

  As for himself, Cody shunned the attention. As far as he was concerned, the incident couldn't blow over fast enough, and for once he looked forward to the company and solitude of sheep. However, it wasn't only superstition fueling the incident: it was the law.

  Two hundred years ago King William II made a pact with the dragons. It stipulated that dragons and men were to have no contact with each other. Conflict and even outright war would continue to erupt between the two species as it had done for millennia during which widespread conflict had devastated large swathes of populated areas of England.

  The pact was known as the Pactum Draconicum. It specified a seasonal stipend of livestock to the dragons’ clan leaders. In return, the clan, whose territory was the southwestern part of England, would no longer raid human communities for resources; hunting would be limited to wild game only, and only in that clan's region. The pact covered all clan territories in the kingdom.

  For two hundred years the agreement kept the peace between man and dragon. England thrived and dragons no longer feared starvation in times of famine, and cooperation between the kingdom's two dominant species was forged.

  The kingdom considered the Pactum Draconicum a cardinal law for every citizen to abide by strictly, and both sides believed any deviation would put the pact in jeopardy; thus, breaking the pact was considered a gravely punishable offense.

  Cody insisted it wasn't the same dragon. As if that quelled any confusion. A large black and red male. The description didn't match any known dragons in southwest England.

  All the sheep suddenly bleated at once, bolting in every direction like wildflower seeds in the wind. Cory didn't understand until he saw Twig running the opposite way. He felt powerful gusts of wind pulse behind him.

  He turned to see a dragon landing a dozen meters away.

  "Hello, shepherd," the dragon said.

  * * *

  Cody let the flock fend for itself. He knew Twig would look after them. But the dog only kept his master in sight, refusing to get any closer.

  Cody dropped his jaw at the large winged predator as she returned a confident glare.

  She pulled in her wings and tucked them delicately against her body as if she cultivated a softness about her, yet her gaze was steely and piercing. Heavy brow ridges framed a pair of deep-set eyes, hawklike and penetrating. They gave her an intelligent look, cutting through him, almond, unblinking, and she transfixed the small boy.

  "You're n-not the one who attacked me ..." he spoke breathlessly.

  She only regarded him with attentive eyes, and stretched her long neck forward.

  He wondered if he could get her to understand. "Thank you for saving—"

  She stepped forward.

  Cody swallowed. He took a half-step back.

  Dark and light brown and tan-colored hide clung to her sleek musculature. Her shoulders were powerful, and supported a sinuous neck. Her head was narrow and pointed at the snout, two large nostrils set atop, and two long horns at the rear of her skull glinted in the sun like the horns of a bull. The leathery hide of her wings appeared draped over raw bone, and yet seemed decorated for beauty with alternating patterns of earth-tone colors. Where the wings attached to her streamlined body it was swollen with thick round muscle, as was her deep barrel chest. Pebbly scales covered her flowing form and gleamed in the sunlight. She lowered her long graceful neck toward the human as if a gentle arm reached to examine a flower.

  The shepherd tapped his chest. "Cody. My name is Cody. Do you understand me?" He pointed at himself again.

  She narrowed her eyes.

  He tried again, this time pointing to the dragon's chest. "You?" he asked. "What do you call yourself?" Do dragons even have names, he wondered.

  She blinked. She took another step forward as Cody remained still and repeated his gesture as her heavy claws settled into the grassy meadow.

  Cody took a bold step forward, arms partly outstretched in front, palms up. His eyes never broke from hers.

  Her chest swelled as she took a breath, and her jaws opened slightly...

  "Urrr-eeeehh!"

  The shepherd stumbled back.

  Her expression brightened. "Co-dee!" she repeated.

  Cody got to his feet in the midst of another inflected growling hiss, and heard, "I am Tara."

  He understood her! "Tara!" he repeated, jubilant.

  * * *

  Tara was stunned. Haltingly, their exchange continued. His attempts at approximating the dragon language were wretched, but serviceable. The boy simply did not have the body volume to reach the low echoing grumbles that composed a drake vocabulary. It was the first time she had heard a human speak her tongue.

  She herself slowly picked up on human words.

  After a while Cody seemed to understand everything she said, almost intuitively, picking up meaning as soon as the words escaped her jaws. After a while they understood each other as rudimentary, primitive words gave way to full phrases, then whole sentences.

  They talked long into the night at the forest's edge, the human gathering kindling, and her watching him to marvel at his expert use of his hands, using heaped wood to start a fire. They sat across from each other, the fire crackling and popping noisily between them as Cory occasionally fed it with small branches. Tara talked about flying, and the clan and her friends, and the elders. Cody talked about Hogswash, and a life of herding sheep, and Bean Blossom, the name of the meadow where he lived in a small cottage with his grandfather. It was interesting enough, she supposed.

  Tara had no idea human society could be as complicated as Cody made it sound. She'd been under the impression that humans just moved herds of tasty livestock around during the day and slept in their squarish wood and stone nests at night.

  Their talk was long and engaging. She was intelligent, with an amusing personality and spoke with humor and a love of life. She was wise yet exuberant, qualities he liked.

  As the stars winked into the coming night sky and began their slow wheeling overhead, Cody looked up as she caught his eyes—

  And she fell into them.

  It was unlike anything she had ever experienced. They both gasped and froze where they were, and outwardly, nothing appeared to happen. But within, Tara felt herself falling, falling ... until something intangible, unknowable from inside the human touched her and brought her close to him.

  Her heart thumped like a jackrabbit's foot, and her breath came in short shallow gasps. She was touching his soul, and he, hers. And it felt right. So right. Bright and warm. Radiating. Like she had felt in her best times with—

  She ripped herself
away.

  Cody was on his feet and out of breath and as shaken as she was. He stepped back, stumbling over tree roots, and fell backwards to the ground.

  She turned, and with two great bounding leaps, launched herself into the night sky

  * * *

  The dragoness alighted on a moonlit mountaintop choked with an early snowfall and a steady cold wind. She needed the harsh icy conditions to clear her mind.

  She paced through the frigid powder, vapor rising from her nostrils like trails of white smoke in the chilly night air.

  She'd heard of such things before, had been told signs by the elder Fathers, as most dragons had, but never believed it would happen to her. Not like this...

  A spirit calling...?

  The feeling had been so intense that she could not deny its reality. Far beyond Snoweyes's intuition at finding his eagle—rather, as if a soul had recognized its destiny.

  She knew some dragons experienced similar things, like when meeting a life mate for the first time ... during a quest ... when death was imminent.

  It wasn't unusual to feel the presence of a passed loved one. In fact, that's what some elder Fathers believed a spirit-calling was: the spirits of their dead loved ones coming back briefly to guide them at the most critical moment of their lives.

  She tilted her head up at the starry sky. She visualized her lost mate's spirit far beyond even the highest clouds that dragons could fly to. Decades after his untimely death, was he watching over her?

  Is this my path? She asked her dead mate. Tearlach, does my destiny lie with that human boy somehow?

  Tara didn't know the answer. She only knew the Council of Fathers maintained a strict mandate, that contact with mankind be nonexistent. Her associating with Cody would lead to very serious trouble if it were found out.

  But she didn't care for that. At least not now.

  With a new sense of purpose and a night's rest, Tara eagerly flew back into the morning sky, and returned to the meadow.

  * * *

  Cody settled into an unusual sleeping nest— in the crook of the dragon's wingarms.

  The shepherd had no idea what had happened last night between them. A sort of connection? A shared emotional intensity, as if they had the same heartbeat. Some sort of dragon magic? She had seemed as startled and disturbed by it as he had.

  Yet she had returned, which had taken him nearly as much by surprise.

  She tried to talk to him about it, but their communication was too new and too limited to get much meaning over something this complicated.

  She tried to emphasize a point by gently pulling his hands to her chest with her sickle-claw wingedges. The supple sun-warmed pebbled scales under his hands were oddly pleasant. More importantly, he felt the soft thumping of her heartbeat.

  As the day stretched to night, they moved from just inside the tree line of a nearby forest and settled for sleep in the meadow, apparently reluctant to return to her mountain home as yet. She invited him to snuggle up to her again, and he was grateful for it, and not just because she was a pleasant source of warmth against the autumn night. Somehow it just felt right.

  Of course if anyone saw them they might report it, and possibly imprison him, or worse.

  Whatever mysterious force had forged a forbidden bond between a dragon and a young shepherd would need to be explored another time. The rise and fall of her massive chest lulled him into slumber, confined in her protective wings, and for the first time they slept curled tightly together, until morning.

  ###

  Thank you for reading my short story. It was a labor of love. If you enjoyed it, won't you please take a moment to leave me a review?

  Thanks!

  J. J. Abraham

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