Wildfire – Part Sixty-Six

Chapter Eight – Part Five

Derica Deliberating

“Inside that c-cave was a man. When Vanni explained to him what she was running away from and why she needed to hide away for a while, he was glad to offer her shelter. The man said she would have to stay at least until the flames d-died down on the other side of the border.

“Though this m-man was shrouded in even more d-darkness than the shadowy lands around them both, Vanni could make out his face. It was a very handsome one with a prominent jaw and full, dark brows. In fact, he was much more attractive to Vanni than K-Karstan was.”

There were just enough details to provide a direction for this mysterious man’s face but you could create whatever picture you wanted. Without realising what I’d done, my mind cast Ferdel in the role of the enigmatic cave man. A more romantic girl might have called either one of them swarthy.

“That n-night, the man made his way over to where Vanni lay on the cave floor. It seemed that he was j-just as sleepless as she was. He didn’t reach out to t-touch Vanni but instead he whispered in her ear with the sweetest of voices. Vanni listened, helpless in her rapture as the m-man told her about all the wonderful things he could do for her if she would allow him to do so. Didn’t she know that it was within his power to rescue her from the terrible marriage she didn’t want?

“Soaked in the sheer magic of the moment, Vanni d-didn’t stop to think that this man somehow knew so much more than she had told him about her life and the events that had brought her to him. She sensed him in her soul. He knew everything about her, knew her b-better than she did.

“Even though she was sure in her heart that it was so very wrong, even though she didn’t want to think about the consequences, Vanni opened her arms to the mysterious m-man. Whether she did it for desire alone or because of the belief that he would rescue her just as he promised, she’d never admit to anyone.”

And there it was, the morality moment. An unmarried girl had given in to temptation and desire and committed the terrible act of opening her legs before a ring was on her finger. Bad things were bound to come and Vanni couldn’t blame anyone else in the story but herself.

Wildfire – Part Sixty-Five

Chapter Eight – Part Four

Derica Deliberating

Even though Pratchki’s eyes were as wide as they could go, she couldn’t be all that innocent. Maybe she was a bit too young when she heard the story to appreciate the full meaning but anyone would understand what followed when a man took a woman to his bed without wanting children.

“Before K-Karstan could come to claim his bride, Vanni, decked out in her wedding finery, fled the village and ran away from the m-marriage she couldn’t bear to go through with. In her blind panic, she ran straight into the p-path of a wildfire that had been surging through the lands to the north of Sandshore.”

As wildfires went, you had to admit that it had been somewhat inconvenient. Vital for the story though.

“Rather than go b-back with her tail between her legs, to a fate that so cruel in its certainty, Vanni felt that she didn’t have any other choice b-but to escape the flames by crossing over into the F-Forsaken Lands.”

In spite of the tragic look on Pratchki’s face, my curiosity got the better of me. “The Forsaken Lands? Where’s that?”

“N-north. They’re, they’re the closest thing this world has to h-hell.”

Well, at least no one was being dramatic about it.

“One day, it was a thriving kingdom and the next it was c-cursed forever. It’s always d-dark there, nothing grows and there are m-monsters everywhere. For the realm of m-midnight to have been a b-better place for Vanni to go than the thought of going home, she must have felt that her future in Sandshore was without hope alt-together.

“As she was travelling through that place of t-total darkness, Vanni found herself following a faint light. It was like a shaft of muted sunbeam and it led her all the way to the m-mouth of a cave. She was sure that the light must have been the guiding hand of the goddess Iri the Flamebright. Vanni thought that she was b-being blessed with passage through the dangerous Forsaken Lands.”

Her voice was shaking even more than normal but as the words poured out, I could tell that Pratchki believed every one of them. I listened on.

“Inside that c-cave was a man. When Vanni explained to him what she was running away from and why she needed to hide away for a while, he was glad to offer her shelter. The man said she would have to stay at least until the flames d-died down on the other side of the border.

Wildfire – Part Sixty-Four

Chapter Eight – Part Three

Derica Deliberating

By this point, it sounded like Pratchki was reciting a story she’d heard over and again. Someone had fed this to her. But I had to wait to get to the end to work out to what end. It felt like a fairy tale, crafted with a twisted purpose to teach children to stay in line or something like that.

“When a v-victor emerged, Vanni was well beyond horrified. Her champion turned out to be a grizzled warrior, K-Karstan the C-C-Courageous. He was marked with a p-patchwork quilt of scars and various old unhealed wounds. More than that, it was well known that he already had a string of wives dotted about across the country. There were even rumours that he’d landed a Kiranvari bride. A wife from Chavon’s most important country was impressive by anyone’s standards.”

Sure, he bragged that he had a wife in every port but would anyone have seen these women together? Reports of this Karstan’s virility were overblown, I’d have put money on it.

“It was clear to Vanni to the point that it hurt that the man set to c-claim her saw her as nothing more than yet another prize to be won. His various wives had already produced several healthy young sons for him, strapping lads who could one day scrap for the chance to take over K-Karstan’s adventuring ways. Well, any of them could set off into the world the way their papa had but only one of them c-could inherit his mantle.”

Pratchki’s mouth twisted as if she was uncomfortable. “I d-don’t know what that meant though, it was just what my P-Papa said.”

“A mantle’s a cloak. But I think it just means his title, there’s can’t be more than one Karstan at any one time.”

“M-makes sense.” She nodded and carried on with her story. “In the meantime, K-Karstan was happy to tell anyone who cared to know that he wasn’t looking for someone to bear him any more children. Vanni, inexperienced and sheltered from the wider world, didn’t know what to think at that.”

Even though Pratchki’s eyes were as wide as they could go, she couldn’t be all that innocent. Maybe she was a bit too young when she heard the story to appreciate the full meaning but anyone would understand what followed when a man took a woman to his bed without wanting children.

Wildfire – Part Sixty-Three

Chapter Eight – Part Two

Derica Deliberating

She gulped and carried on with the story. “Sandshore is a very long way away from anywhere, hundreds of miles from the great sprawling d-desert in the south. And no one there has ever been to the cities of Hadyn. There’s not much else to be getting on with so it doesn’t take much t-time for stories to take hold. There’s only so many times you can talk about the big cow or the time Nessie fell asleep and caused the barn to burn down.”

I raised my eyebrows at that and fought the urge to giggle. The last thing I wanted to do was to break Pratchki’s flow since she’d started telling me her home truths.

“By the t-time that Vanni was of an age to be wed there were already several suitors, or the families of such, who’d expressed an interest in her hand in marriage. Her p-parents were overwhelmed by the choices on offer. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Vanni herself would be c-consulted about of course.”

It was impossible not to butt in. “Girls being asked about what kind of future they wanted to have? Madness.”

That prompted a weak laugh. “In the old days they had a way of solving those sorts of p-problems. They held a tournament where the men could fight it out over Vanni. For a young lady to d-draw the attention of several potential husbands was quite rare.”

She looked down, scuffing the floor with her foot. “When I first heard the story, I felt sorry for the less p-pretty girls of the village. They must have felt neglected by all the fuss over Vanni. It’s not like boys would ever want to fight for my honour.”

The confession just made me sigh. “Would you want them to?”

At least Pratchki had the grace to look embarrassed. “Sup-pose not. Anyway, back then it made sense for the spectacle to serve as entertainment for the village and anyone else that wanted to c-come to the festivities. The m-men who t-took part fought long and hard into the night, battling on for the chance to claim that pretty mouth and those dark eyes.”

By this point, it sounded like Pratchki was reciting a story she’d heard over and again. Someone had fed this to her. But I had to wait to get to the end to work out to what end. It felt like a fairy tale, crafted with a twisted purpose to teach children to stay in line or something like that.

Wildfire – Part Sixty-Two

Chapter Eight – Part One

Derica Deliberating

“Come on then, tell me the story.”

Right away, Pratchki was on high alert. “What st-story?”

I rolled my eyes and gave her a stern look. “You know what I’m talking about.”

Throughout the afternoon and the dinner we’d eaten together, I’d been turning those scraps of words that Pratchki had sobbed out over in my mind. I couldn’t help it, I had to know what was going on with her. It was too important for me to be able to wait for her to be ready to tell me. And I wasn’t the most patient of people.

Pratchki took a deep shuddering breath. “Well, it all st-starts with Vanni the Wayward. She was my great-and then some-grandmother a f-few hundred years ago. It was said that she was a great beauty, a shining star.”

Of course she was. It wasn’t like there was much point telling stories about plain women or, shudder at the thought, downright unattractive ones. None of them would’ve been worth mentioning so many years down the line.

“Even people who’d never seen her had heard tell of her flawless skin and her lively, expressive eyes. She was the p-pride of the same village that my family and I live in, Sandshore, in n-northern Hadyn. Well, where I l-lived.”

I reached out to touch Pratchki’s shoulder. Her eyes flicked down to my hand and she smiled, blinking to stem the flow of tears. Home was a sore subject for her.

She gulped and carried on with the story. “Sandshore is a very long way away from anywhere, hundreds of miles from the great sprawling d-desert in the south. And no one there has ever been to the cities of Hadyn. There’s not much else to be getting on with so it doesn’t take much t-time for stories to take hold. There’s only so many times you can talk about the big cow or the time Nessie fell asleep and caused the barn to burn down.”

Wildfire – Part Sixty-One

Chapter Seven – Part Eight

Derica, with Pratchki

I couldn’t hold the memories inside my head anymore. The harder I tried to reach for them, the swifter they slipped into the mists of time. It’d been like trying to coax water from a stone to winkle the full story out of Ellerey of how I’d come to him. After a while, for the sake of my sanity, I’d given up. I’d never know what his reasons were for silence and whether or not they were at all good.

Pratchki, for all that she insisted on hiding herself away from everyone else, was a lot easier to puzzle out than my dead dragon master. Her ragged and rather desperate state had made me feel an awful lot better about how I’d been coping so far with life in the Starshine Republic.

Leaving Pratchki soaking in a steaming tub, as happy as a pig in mud, I went in search for food. I begged a few odds and ends from the kitchen which a washed and dried Pratchki wolfed down as soon as I returned to the room. She must’ve been without proper food for a long time. If you were famished then even bread, cheese and an old floury apple became a feast.

After a while, I even persuaded Pratchki to let me comb through her matted wet hair. It helped my argument that Kade had already managed to get himself ensnared in the red curls a few times during his exploration of his new friend.

I didn’t mention the dropping that I found deposited in the nest of tangles and just did my best to remove it without drawing attention to what I was doing. There was a reason why I wore my own hair quite so short.

Shedding the outward appearance of a filthy urchin wasn’t quite as much of a transformation in Pratchki as I wanted. The girl was terrified of her own shadow. She started and stuttered at the slightest thing. It was clear to me that there were fears about her strange skin condition. Pratchki still couldn’t bring herself to tell me what it was. In Starshine, it seemed that mysteries piled up at an alarming rate.

I knew that it wasn’t an original observation that most people were damaged in one way or another, even if it wasn’t always in ways that showed. But it was something of a comfort for there to be more than one broken person in town. I wasn’t alone. What I needed to do was untwist some of the secrets that were wrapped around Pratchki.

The younger girl seemed to be ordinary enough apart from her swirling patterns. Well, she was human shaped for sure. The dragons wouldn’t have run off for just anyone though. Figuring out Pratchki wouldn’t explain all of the strange behaviours that the dragons had started exhibiting in Starshine but it would have been a bloody good start.

Wildfire – Part Sixty

Chapter Seven – Part Seven

Derica, with Pratchki

“Other dragon breeders I know have ingrained traditions that it’d be such a shame, in their heads, to throw off just because they’re awful. One guy I knew in Lameni only allowed himself to use names that started with the letter ‘Q’. I can’t believe he didn’t realise how soon he’d run out. After Quoko and Qilrys, it started to get embarrassing. I just pick names I like. To be fair, I haven’t had to name any dragons before today. Well, no one besides Cheka.”

At the sound of her name, Cheka let out a series of happy trills. “And I haven’t had any complaints so far.” I extended gentle fingertips towards the tiny black hatchling. “This is Dehani.”

We continued our walk to the inn in companionable silence. It was something of a new experience for me to have an actual person in my life that I felt the need to protect. Well, the dragons would always need that sort of attention from me but they didn’t count. I couldn’t remember what life had been like without them. But a human being was another matter altogether.

Maybe Master Ellerey could’ve been considered as someone in need of my protection, as his loyal apprentice. The further I travelled away from the life I had with him the less sure I was about the whole situation. I’d always be grateful to him for taking me in when I’d been on my own. But his resolute refusal to ever look back, to examine the past, had been rather difficult to deal with.

For all I knew, Ellerey’s insistence on sticking in the present might have been with good reason. He could’ve been trying to shield a young and vulnerable me from a hard truth that had divided me from my parents. Maybe he wanted to push me further away from those memories to the point that I wasn’t sure that the faces I pictured were at all true to life.

Had I lost them or had they lost me? I’d been told so often that they were lost without being able to ask anything more that it was all I knew. Pratchki’s question about my family had stirred up uncomfortable feelings in me.

I couldn’t hold the memories inside my head anymore. The harder I tried to reach for them, the swifter they slipped into the mists of time. It’d been like trying to coax water from a stone to winkle the full story out of Ellerey of how I’d come to him. After a while, for the sake of my sanity, I’d given up. I’d never know what his reasons were for silence and whether or not they were at all good.

Wildfire – Part Fifty-Nine

Chapter Seven – Part Six

Derica, with Pratchki

“What? Oh, no.” I smiled. The question made me appreciate the surprising independence of female dragons when it came to their offspring. “Dragons don’t mate as such. They’re a pack animal at heart. Whenever a female meets a male, she’ll pick up some of his nature.” It wasn’t the best explanation but I hoped that it was simple enough for Pratchki to understand.

The way that dragons shared their essences meant that some keepers were altogether far too strict about what sorts they let their precious specimens mix with. My lot were mongrels as far as exclusive keepers were concerned.

Pratchki didn’t look too confused so I carried on. “So when a female lays eggs the babies can come out as any combination of all the males she’s met over the course of her life. And dragons only produce offspring when there’s enough of a group to keep the babies alive. Girl dragons don’t have to be all that involved in parenting, it can be more of a communal situation for a brood.”

“And how do you choose a name for a new d-dragon?”

It was interesting to have a new perspective on my process. I’d never thought about it that much when it came to naming.

“How do you decide to name anything? Some turns to myths, legends or some other fragment of the culture around them like the current ruler of the day.”

The number of tiny hatchlings I’d seen named after some derivation of King Maurizio of Bespai would’ve been impressive if it hadn’t shown up so many breeders as either unimaginative or suck ups. Some were both. No matter how much I admired the ruler of Starshine, I was determined not to name any new hatchlings after Lady Josette.

“Other dragon breeders I know have ingrained traditions that it’d be such a shame, in their heads, to throw off just because they’re awful. One guy I knew in Lameni only allowed himself to use names that started with the letter ‘Q’. I can’t believe he didn’t realise how soon he’d run out. After Quoko and Qilrys, it started to get embarrassing. I just pick names I like. To be fair, I haven’t had to name any dragons before today. Well, no one besides Cheka.”

Wildfire – Part Fifty-Eight

Chapter Seven – Part Five

Derica, with Pratchki

Eyes still shining with her tears, Pratchki gave a weak nod. The beginnings of a smile were starting to break through the despair and she started to wipe away the evidence of her emotional outburst with the back of one of her heavy sleeves.

I slung an arm around the girl, realising that she’d just become my friend. “We’ll stick together Pratchki. You and me, demon girl,” Pratchki cringed again but I kept going, “and dragon seller. Maybe we could fight crime.” I started steering Pratchki towards the inn where I’d taken a room.

No matter how intriguing Pratchki was, I couldn’t let myself get too distracted from what had to be my main concern, the dragons. Something worrying was going on with them.

There was something special about Pratchki but the way the dragons had run off still bothered me. And Bayort’s excessive flaming had to be ushered back under control. He’d never make a valuable pet for a Hadynite overlord otherwise.

The tiny hatchling, who I’d decided to call Dehani, seemed to be as healthy as I could expect. It’d been a less eventful scramble into the world than other dragon hatchings I’d seen. But it was all happening much too fast.

Eggs were supposed to take months to hatch. Some dragon keepers managed to make a showcase out of breeds that took several years to emerge from the egg, something about rarity value. But Cheka had laid that clutch less than a week ago.

Something in the Starshine Republic had sped up the pace of dragon development and I wouldn’t feel easy until I’d figured it out. The mystery had to be the cause of the unusual frisky behaviour in the boys. I needed to get the new back to the lodgings for a more thorough examination.

I was distracted from my churning concerns by a question from Pratchki.

“So, is Bayort or Kade the father?”

Ah, she must have been basing her understanding of dragon behaviour on farm life. Chicks didn’t hatch without a rooster around to contribute his share of the process.

“What? Oh, no.” I smiled. The question made me appreciate the surprising independence of female dragons when it came to their offspring. “Dragons don’t mate as such. They’re a pack animal at heart. Whenever a female meets a male, she’ll pick up some of his nature.” It wasn’t the best explanation but I hoped that it was simple enough for Pratchki to understand.

Wildfire – Part Fifty-Seven

Chapter Seven – Part Four

Derica, with Pratchki

I offered a hand to Pratchki. Before I knew what was happening, Pratchki had pitched forward to lean against me so hard she almost knocked me over. Through the muffled sobs that followed, I thought that I could make out a few fragments of sense. Something about a demon girl and forsaken and not being good enough. To tell the truth, it all sounded a bit grim. In Pratchki’s own time, I might get the full story.

Disturbed by the noisy sobs, Cheka and the little black hatchling looked over at us. There wasn’t a hand gesture I could think of that would help them understand the situation. I didn’t understand it myself and had no idea how to communicate with the dragons, let alone comfort the sobbing girl. Before long, the hatchling went back to his meal.

It was awkward but I opted for patting Pratchki on the head. That just made the howls get louder. From around the girl’s neck, it sounded like Kade had joined in with the din. He was by far the most dramatic of the three dragons. But at least it meant that he and Pratchki were bonding. This was one of the times when the dragons’ sensitivity more than trumped mine.

Showing his growing anxiety, Bayort started to paw at the pooling cloak down by Pratchki’s feet. A lurch in my stomach put me on guard. Not again. All it took was for Bayort to open his mouth for me to dive to the ground to try and divert the spout of flame that I was ninety-nine per cent sure had to be coming. I thanked my lucky stars for the spurt of intuition.

With her support removed without the slightest bit of warning, Pratchki tumbled to the ground. I grimaced when I saw that my fast action hadn’t been quite quick enough. The fire was soon patted out but Bayort had managed to burn a sizable hole in the hem of Pratchki’s cloak. At least the tension had been broken and Pratchki was no longer wailing.

“I’ll fix it, I promise. Shall we go and get that food for you then?”

Eyes still shining with her tears, Pratchki gave a weak nod. The beginnings of a smile were starting to break through the despair and she started to wipe away the evidence of her emotional outburst with the back of one of her heavy sleeves.