The slight girl swinging an empty bucket hiked down the seaside ruts in the early morning, only her shadow, the sun, and the breeze keeping her company. The shadow, because of the angle of the sun and the fact that she held the bucket in both hands, looked bent and afraid as it followed her along what passed for a road. But the seven-year-old girl’s face showed no signs of fear, just a lipless determination to make it to the well.
Ileth was her name. She liked watching animals eat, the smell of pine trees, and climbing just about anything for the exertion of it and a chance to be alone with the view.
She had a view now. Out on the bay the fishing boats were already at work. You could see them gently rocking on the white-flecked sea, some near, some indistinct on the horizon, casting nets and pulling up traps. The cold air pouring down the mountains chilled her just as it no doubt did the men on the boats, but there was sun for a change this morning, and sunshine always cheered her.
She would have been smiling, except for the awkwardness of carrying the bucket. Who wouldn’t rather be out in the sun and fresh air, even with a cold wind off the glacier-choked mountains? Anything to get away from the Lodge, with its stuffy cabbage smells and last night’s stale tobacco.
She clomped up to the well in her scuffed, too-large shoes, not looking forward to the trip back up to the Lodge with the bucket full and at least three more trips ahead of her. The Lodge did have its own water pump, but it was out of order. Again. She should hurry. She’d already been warned about being poky this morning. They only warned you once.
A shadow flashed across the road, quick and vast, startling her. She looked up and froze in her clompy shoes, gaping.
A dragon! And so close!
It bore a rider, and the town watch-bell wasn’t ringing, so that meant a Vale Dragoneer. Silver scales gleamed in the sun against the banner-blue sky. The dragon had some difficulty as it descended in its turn and set down fast and hard enough to raise dust, skidding and counterbalancing with its long tail whipping like a fleeing cat taking a corner. Its claws scored the earth into plowshare furrows. Bigger than a horse but smaller than a whale and mostly made of wings, it had a powerful neck supporting an armored wedge of a head and a long tapering tail, both fantastically flexible, that balanced the front and back ends of the muscular torso.
She’d known they were big, and seen them twice before far off, riding the air like eagles, but even her seven-year-old imagination couldn’t have given the dragon’s tendons and muscles their power and weight, its eye the intelligent cast as it glanced up and down the road, or its wings their washing-line rustle as it settled and folded them. She decided the dragon was long enough to wrap itself around almost any house of her little town and touch its own tail on the doorstep, shading the roof with its wings.
The dragoneer jumped off the saddle, all boots and sheep hide and gauntlets and scarf. The rider took off a wind-cutter helmet and the girl with the bucket saw fine, sharp features and hair wound up and pinned tight.
A woman!
She’d always imagined the dragoneers as men. Lone riders, in her vast experience of being seven and allowed trips into town for errands, were always men. The Republic’s couriers bringing the mail were always men. Hunters, men. Traveling tinkers and pack merchants, men. Drovers, men. Stern, black-clad commissioners, men.
The dragon approached the well. It coughed. “Water,” it said thickly, in the girl’s own Montangyan tongue. Most people in the Vales spoke Montangyan, and everyone could understand it. Salt dusted its skin; it must have been flying close to the water for some time. The speech startled Ileth. A part of her knew dragons could talk, even learn human tongues, but it still seemed like an entertainer’s trick.
The rider threw down and drew up the well bucket on its good rope and well-oiled spool. The people of the Freesand on the North Coast were nautical and knew good rope from bad. They’d never let a public well line fray.
The dragon drank. The girl watched it lap up the water like a dog, its tongue a blur, then the neck muscles ripple in fast succession as they sent the water down the muscular neck. The girl swallowed experimentally, feeling her own throat work.
Farther down the road, townsfolk emerged from behind their colorful doors—the people of the Freesand made up for their drab little salt-bleached houses with elaborately painted doors—suddenly having business on their doorsteps, but really to look at the dragon. They kept their distance. The beasts were unpredictable and didn’t like crowds, and everyone had heard the story about the time the tanner’s son had both his legs broken when he was caught by the tail of a dragon when it startled and turned.
But the girl with the bucket liked animals, the bigger the better. Especially tall, proud horses that swished their tails. She walked up to the well with the fearlessness of seven.
The dragon had infinitely more tail than a horse and its tip swished impatiently as it drank. Ileth tried counting the scales but it was an impossible task, especially on a moving tail. The dragon cocked one eye in her direction and finished the bucket, smacking its toothy mouth in satisfaction.
Its rider—no, his, only the green dragons were female, all the others were male—his rider inspected his left wing.
“The stitching popped,” the dragoneer said. “No wonder we nearly plunked.” She spoke well, what the stricter of the two teachers who sometimes came to the Lodge would call best correct. The dragoneer went to her saddle, opened a leather case, and produced some white line the girl with the bucket couldn’t identify. It looked a bit like cording, only thinner.
Mechanically, as if there weren’t a dragon just on the other side of it, the little girl drew up water and filled her bucket, watching the dragon while she worked.
The dragon sniffed the air about her. The girl watched his nostrils take in air, like a landed fish gulping. A forked tongue flicked out and back, so quickly she wasn’t sure it had even happened.
“Agrath, don’t do the thing with your teeth,” the dragoneer said, extracting some bits of frayed line from the creature’s wing. “She’s just a child.”
The seven-year-old forgot her bucket and ventured out into the open before the dragon.
“The th-thing with y-y-your teeth?” the girl said. She didn’t like to talk because of her stutter, but how often could you ask a dragon a question, anyway?
The dragon stared straight at her, extending his neck a little so he slowly, serpentlike, came closer to her face. He had numberless tiny facets of polished silver metal scale in fascinating array all over his face, going down to the leathery spiked fans behind his jaw. You could get lost tracing the intricate patterns. With a suddenness of a curtain snapping in the wind, the dragon pulled back his lips and revealed a mouthful of gleaming teeth. To the girl there seemed to be hundreds of them lined up in his mouth like fish packed in oil. All long as boat-nails and sharp as daggers.
She squeaked in shock and jumped back.