“What should we?—”
“Oh, fuck?—”
“Old Gods help us?—”
Everyone spoke at once. I interrupted them, sending a small flare of magic through the air to catch their attention. They shut their mouths at once.
I curled my fingers into my palms, feeling vaguely embarrassed. I still wasn’t used to controlling so much magic.
“Shut up. Get yourselves together. Now let’s go catch a baby dragon before it destroys the town.”
CHAPTER 4
Fiella
It turned out that baby dragons wereextremelyadept at playing hide-and-seek. So much so that even after hours of searching, we couldn’t find the newly hatched creature.
It was like it hatched and promptly poofed out of existence.
Still, we kept looking.
We crept through Town Square, peeking under benches and behind shrubs, around tree trunks and in squirrel nests. We poked our heads into shops and peered into cottage windows. We tried to catch a scent trail.
No luck.
We even ventured to the edges of the forest, disturbing piles of fallen leaves and searching through foliage.
The problem was, nobody knew enough about dragons to predict where they might want to hide.
In old legends, dragons typically hatched in the caves beneath the Rockward mountains, far, far away. Dread settled like a stone in my stomach when I considered that the tiny dragon might be on its way to the mountains now, braving the Barren Lands in an attempt to get there.
No. That was too awful to consider. They had to be around here somewhere.
A soothing hand settled onto my neck, fingers digging into the muscles there. “Let’s take a break,” Redd insisted. “It’s getting dark—we can look again in the morning.”
I resisted. “No! We can’t leave the dragon in the forest alone! It’s just a baby! It doesn't even have a name yet!” I was horrified just thinking about it. Violent creatures lurked in the depths of the Greenwood Forest. Predators that could swallow a small critter in one bite.
I was going to be sick.
“We have to. Let’s meet with the others one last time, and then we’ll get a fresh start tomorrow. It’ll be okay. It has survived hundreds of years trapped in a tiny shell. Surely it can survive one night of freedom.”
My throat tightened and the backs of my eyes prickled. I wasnotgoing to cry. Not now. Not when I didn’t have something real to cry about. “Are you sure?”
He stroked my skin soothingly. “I’m sure, love. Let’s go.”
I sniffled. “Okay. I hope you’re right.”
We stepped over fallen logs and our boots crunched through dried, icy leaves as we made our way back to town. The smell of frost and sickly-sweet decaying plant matter was hardly a comfort. I kept imagining a tiny dragon, cold, all alone, curled up by itself…
“Stop thinking about it,” Redd insisted. “It’s going to be okay.”
But I wasn’t too sure.
And then, I caught a whiff of something unexpected at the edge of the forest.
Smoke.
I inhaled again to be sure.
