Dragon's Heart (9 page)

She sent him a rude bit of color, full of snags and sparkles. Like a mind belch.

The sending made him laugh, and that was so inappropriate, he immediately covered it up with a cough, as if he were choking on the eggs.

Looking down at the table demurely, Akki said loudly, "I don't know about anyone else, but I slept like a baby. Easier on a mattress and bed than the stone floor of a cave. And you?"

He sent a mind belch back at her, and steadfastly refused to apologize.

At that point, Slakk came into the dining hall and joined them, sitting at the far end of the table, which was then awash in complaints about snoring roommates, pillows that needed new feathers, slats missing in beds—the usual.

"And you," Slakk said suggestively, pointing at Jakkin. "You came to bed awfully late last night."

"Ooooooo!" The comment ran around the table, and suddenly everyone stared and grinned at Akki. Reddening, she set her lips together so tightly, they looked like a thin scar. Her actual embarrassment served as great camouflage.

Jakkin swallowed quickly. He'd been out late again in the incubarn and run back to the bondhouse just before Dark-After. He hadn't seen Likkarn that time, but if Akki was right, the old man must have been couched down with an about-to-lay hen. He reminded himself to be more careful.

Still, he had to deal with Slakk's accusation. "Stomach problems," Jakkin said, making a sour face and pointing to his belly. "Not used to all this rich food." He rubbed his palm over the offending stomach, but no one seemed convinced.
And really, how bad could it be if they think Akki and I are together at night. It would give us more chance to move about.

Just then Kkarina came out of the kitchen and overheard him. She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, glaring, though her face gave her away as she tried to hide a smile. Jakkin saw her and gulped.

"Rich,
good
food," Jakkin amended loudly.

She came over and clouted him on the head with her open hand.

"
Nice save
." Akki sent, with a picture of a drowning man being lifted from a river by a very large red dragon. It set the man down on a beach, then clouted him gently with a paw.

He grinned at her. "
Nothing
," he sent to her, "
is as important as breakfast
." His sending was bright and full of oval balloons, like giant eggs.

Akki laughed out loud, and the others—thinking she was laughing belatedly at Kkarina's blow to Jakkin's head—laughed with her.

***

AFTER BREAKFAST, and after checking the chores list, Akki called Jakkin to the side door.

"We really have to stop our sendings," she warned quietly. "Or we're going to make them all suspicious."

"They're
already
suspicious," he whispered back.

"They're suspicious that we've pair-bonded. Likkarn probably told someone about that kiss. Wouldn't you be suspicious of two people off together for a year, keeping 'warm' in caves?"

He shrugged, smiling at the memory.

"And one of them going walkabout at night. Where
were
you? We can't afford to let them suspect that we..."

"...communicate without words or can go outside during Dark-After?"

She turned away from him, sending, "
You really are ex-asperating.
"

"Wait a minute." His hand was on her shoulder. "You're the one who keeps sending. Not me."

"I know, I know. I said '
We.
' It's just so easy." She shrugged off his hand. "
See
," she sent, "
we can both shrug
," and opened the door, looking out into the glaring light. "I think Slakk is already guessing."

"Not Slakk. He's not that smart. He's just jealous of me, that's all. Errikkin's too angry about something else to be guessing anything. The rest don't know either of us well enough. Except..."

She spun around. "Except?"

"Old Likkarn, of course."

She glared daggers at him. "
I
can handle him. You're the one who has problems dealing with him. I wish I knew why. He's really all hough and no harm." That was something nursery folk said about male dragons.

Jakkin's face scrunched up, the way it did when he was going to say something hurtful. "Maybe he never harmed
you,
" he began, "but there's not a boy in the nursery who hasn't felt his heavy hand. He thinks a bang on the head or arm or back is a good teaching tool."

"He's only treating you the way dragon studs treat the young males," Akki said. "That's all."

"And me worse than all the others combined."

"Sometimes," Akki told him, "boys whine too much." She turned and walked out the door.

He raced after her. "Where are you going?"

"To the incubarn, to check on Auricle and the hatchling." She kept walking, a fast, long stride.

"She was fine last night. And if there's a change, we'd know because Auricle would have sent to me. Or you."

Akki stopped suddenly, looked at him over her shoulder, glaring. "Auricle is a dragon, not a doctor." She resumed walking.

"You're not a doctor either, Akki," he shot back cuttingly. "Not a
real
one."

That was too close to the bone. Too close to what she feared the most. Akki rounded on him angrily. It was easier getting mad at him than getting mad at the world. "I'm the nearest
almost real
doctor this place has. That's why visiting the quarantined dragons is on
my
list of chores, not yours." She felt taut, like stretched wire. "Likkarn and the men know that I'm the one they have to go to for medical knowledge—especially now, with the embargo. Likkarn says that though medical ships are allowed through, few have actually come."

"I didn't mean—"

She suspected
that
at least was true, but couldn't stop herself from saying, "You never do."

He put his hand out beseechingly, as if he wanted to touch her. Instead he said, "We never fought out there." He gestured vaguely toward the mountains.

Her anger ebbed, her face softened. She took a deep breath. "We fought all the time out there, Jakkin."

He shook his head. "Not really. Not fought—we argued. But we always agreed on the important things. The life-or-death matters. And there were a lot of those." A soft breeze touched Jakkin's face, lifting the hair on his forehead, then letting it fall again, almost obscuring his eyes. Watching him, Akki suddenly felt terribly young and vulnerable. But she couldn't let herself feel that way. Too much was resting on her shoulders, and it frightened her. She wanted him to understand.

"Jakkin..." She was ready to tell him about The Rokk and the lab and how she'd gotten Kkarina to find a way to get her there and that only this morning Kkarina said there was a truck coming to take her off. Today. "Jakkin, about the nursery—"

"We're safe here, Akki, safe from the wardens and the rebels and the trogs. We're home. It's where we belong. I've finally just this minute figured it out. We don't really have to do
anything
about the dragons, you know. Just keep the secret safe. If it's safe, so are we. And so are the dragons. So why are we still arguing?"

And then the moment to confide in him, the moment to tell him how all on her own she'd made plans to go to the city, to work on the most important problem Austar had—that moment was gone. Her fear and her anger flooded back. "Because ... because after a year of freedom, we're not just back home, we're back in bond." She turned away and walked off.

"There
is
no more bond on Austar IV," he called after her. "Haven't you been listening?"

She sent back a loud and very clear hot, pink landscape, with streaks of red.

"Oh, I've been listening, but that's not what I
heard!
" she called over her shoulder. Then, using two hands, she pulled the squalling door of the incubarn open and clumped inside. "We are more in bond than ever," she said, before slamming the door in his face.

JAKKIN DIDN'T understand her.

He guessed he'd never understand her.

He let her go without a response.

Desolate, he walked to the stud barn to start his own chores. He and Akki had been given less than a week's grace to get over the oddness of being back at the nursery before they had to start working. But he hadn't complained. All his life he'd taken work for granted, and now that there was no more bond system, he knew they would have to work even harder.
Still, the rewards should be greater.
And his chores were familiar ones.

Today he had to lead three big male dragons to the mud baths. They would keep his mind off of Akki.

Sometimes, before a male dragon mated, its skin got flaky, the scales discoloring. "Scales like mud, little stud" was not just a nursery rhyme. It was true. In the wild, dragons usually soaked themselves in the muddy rivers, lying down on the river bottoms until only their eyes showed above water. The mud and the river flow scoured their scales clean. The cleaner the scales, the more likely that the male dragon could impress a female. So it was up to the nursery folk to make sure their male dragons had scales that shone like small suns. No use keeping the unpredictable males around unless they could sire more dragons. Or win big in the pits.

The mud pools in the stud barn were part of a great triple-forked water system. One fork sent drinking water into individual stalls, one funneled away wastewater when the stalls were cleaned. The third fork led into the mud baths, and that was where Jakkin went to shepherd the dragons under his care.

But leading a dragon is dangerous work. Just because once in, a dragon enjoyed the mud didn't mean that a worm always cooperated. Many a nursery boy had been nipped or stepped upon while moving a testy male toward the baths. But danger was what Jakkin needed now to stop him thinking about Akki.

Jakkin let himself into the stud barn, and the familiar power of the musk that greeted him almost made him smile. There was simply nothing like it. A hen's smell was softer, cozier, but the smell of a male dragon simply took one's breath away. Going down the long left-hand corridor, Jakkin came to the stall of the first of his assigned dragons, old Blood Bath, who was lying down on his straw and looking gray, dingy, worn. He was the grandsire of Heart's Blood, the great-grandsire of her brood, so Jakkin had a lot of affection for the old worm.

"Not good, not good, old boy," Jakkin whispered, but his sending to the dragon was much sunnier. The orangecolored dragon looked at him with shuttered eyes, the membranes having grown thick with age, leaving him almost blind. Suddenly the membranes lifted, and he stared at Jakkin with dark, unreadable eyes. Those eyes held not even the slightest flicker to signal that he'd once been a fighter and, for a long time, the best stud in the nursery.

"Let's get thee into the bath right away. Thou will feel much better in the mud." He sent the dragon an image of the warm, bubbling bath. "And thou will be a better stud for it."

Startled by the sending, Blood Bath lumbered to his feet, his great head starting to weave back and forth. Standing up, he was huge, even for a dragon, but his underskin beneath the orange scales was horribly faded.

He really is ancient.
Probably not able to mate anymore. But he'd been one of Sarkkhan's first fighting dragons, a mighty winner in his day, who sired many other winners. Yet here he was, still in the stud barn, eating his head off. Jakkin wondered if Likkarn kept him in the nursery in honor of his past glory, instead of selling him to the stews.

If so, good for Likkarn,
he thought begrudgingly.

"Come, thou brave fighter." Jakkin let the dragon sniff his left hand, which brought the great head way down. Then, with his right hand, Jakkin hooked his finger around Blood Bath's ear. Ears were one of the few sensitive areas on a dragon's body and a tug was one way—possibly the best way—of urging a beast out of his stall.

Slakk was suddenly in the corridor ahead of them.

"Bell!" Jakkin called to him, and Slakk ran up to the nearest pull and yanked at it, sending a warning to anyone else in the barn that a stud dragon was unstalled. Then Slakk pressed into the closest safety niche in order to let them go by. Always best to be out of the way when a stud—even an ancient one—was being led to the baths. Though a niche wasn't entirely safe, especially if the dragon hackled and rampaged down the corridor, which sometimes happened during the rutting season. Many of the older nursery men sported blood scores and claw marks that made their arms and legs look as pitted as a desert landscape after an infrequent rain.

But this day Blood Bath was quiet, almost sleepwalking, as they moved toward the bath. Jakkin called back to Slakk, "Clean his stall for me, and I'll second on
your
dragon."

Slakk much preferred raking out the old fewmets and settling new straw for bedding than leading any of the dragons to the bath. In fact, Slakk hated dragons. He'd often threatened to run away from the nursery, and Jakkin was actually surprised—since there was no more bond—that Slakk was still here.

"Done," Slakk called back.

If necessary, Jakkin could trade all his dragon work with Slakk. Unlike Slakk, he loved the beasts. Loved their power, their beauty of movement, their single-mindedness in feeding, in fighting, and in the rut. And now that he could speak to them mind-to-mind, Jakkin loved them even more. As for the fewmets—well, he'd take a blood score any day.
Let Slakk stay up to his knees in the steaming stuff.
Jakkin chuckled at the thought.

When he opened the door to the sunken mud room and let go of the dragon's ear, Blood Bath happily waded in, moving faster than he'd done before. Behind him, Jakkin rode the doorstep platform over the bath.

"Good for thee, old man," he called to the dragon, as he picked up the wire brush from a hook on the door. "Looks like you're not done for yet!" He sent the dragon a bright sparkle of colorful stars. At least he could do that with the dragons though not right now with Akki.

Blood Bath lifted his head, as if astonished, as if he'd already forgotten the earlier sending that had startled him out of his stall. Then he sank down gratefully in the mud. When he was ready, he'd come over for a good scrubbing. And after that, the cleansing shower.