“Don’t touch that.” He glanced up at the cave roof and pebbles dropped as the stones themselves started to shake slightly. “You’ll have the cavern down on our heads.” And howdid he know that? We’d never get an answer, because Dain had none himself. “This way.”
Sure enough, we followed Dain out of the cave, this time without the oppressive atmosphere of fear bearing down on us, but I admit to taking a deeper breath in when we emerged out onto the plain outside of the walls of Blackreach.
“Time to make a break for it?” Lorien asked. “We could head for the forests and live rough, hunting rabbits and birds to feed ourselves and our dragons.”
As if in response to that, the coach rattled up. The horse came to a stop and then looked over our way, snorting to indicate how he felt about us. The man who said he had my mother looked down from the long seat at the front and then asked, “Well, you coming or not?”
“What do you think?”
My brothers looked to me as if I had the answers, but all I had was one.
“If he has my mother… If she’s at his estate, like he says, I need to find out.”
“Blackreach is a cesspit,” Dain growled.
“One filled to the brim with the rotting corpses of rats.” Lorien shrugged his shoulders. “We have dragons and a pocketful of gold.” A glance at the coach and then back at us. “If the old bastard is trying to trick us, we can stick him in the neck and leave him bleeding on the road.”
“I heard that,” the man said, his horse shifting restlessly.
“Good.” My jaw jerked upwards and I stared him down. “Because we’ll make you regret your treachery three times over if you’re lying.”
The Executioner let out a sigh.
“Your mother will be so pleased to see how you’ve turned out.”
With that, we moved closer. He wanted us to sit in the back, but we made clear that would never happen, squishing up beside him on the front seat.
“So what’s your name?” Lorien asked, conversational as you please. “Can’t keep calling you the Executioner.”
His hands wrapped tighter around the reins and then he let out a whistle of breath.
“Barry.”
“Barry?” Lorien looked at me, his amusement plain. “Barry? Your name is not Barry.”
“Bartholomew when I was born, but I go by Barry now.”
At the sound of Lorien’s laughter, he flicked the reins and urged the horse on.
A full day later,I had a dragon demanding yet more food, and so did my brothers.
“Here, here.” Lorien shoved a wad of meat into my hand. Cut from the wild goose Barry had shot down with his crossbow, the dragons had damn near plucked it bare with their incessant appetite. “Hope you’ve got a lot of geese out at this estate of yours, Barry, because these beasties have a hell of a big appetite.”
My dragon tried to snatch all of the meat from my fingers in his haste to fill his aching body.
“Slowly, you silly creature,” I said, pulling off a smaller chunk. He swallowed that without even chewing, then cried for more. “Here you go.”
His hunger was mine, an ache in my chest, in my belly, that wasn’t satisfied until he was. But even when that feeling of wellbeing that came each time his stomach was full didn’t ease the other pain. I wanted Barry’s words to be true with everybreath, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge if it was.
“I’m going to call you Gobble Guts,” Lorien announced, even as his dragon crawled up onto his shoulder, rubbing his face against my brother’s.
“You can’t call a dragon Gobble Guts,” Dain rumbled.
“So what’re you calling your dragon?” Lorien shot back.
Barry let out a huff of breath, scrupulously keeping his eyes on the road.
“Argent.” That was dragged out of the depths of Dain. He only spoke freely when complaining about Lorien or when those strange fits came upon him.
