Dragon's Egg by Sarah L. Thomson Read Free Book Online

accounts. He wouldhave been able to puzzle out a message. But Mella had never learned writing. Too late, it occurred to her that Roger was probably lettered. Wasn’t that something squires had to learn? She could have asked for his help. But there was no point in dwelling on it now.
    She’d be home again as quickly as she could. The dragon had said the Hatching Ground was less than a day’s flight away. It might take a bit longer on horseback. But surely her parents and her dragons would only have two or three days to miss her.
    Something rustled in the darkness between the trees. Paws or a tail raked through dry leaves and dead twigs. Mella jumped a little.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Roger asked. Finished with the horse, he’d come to stand at her elbow.
    â€œI don’t know.” It might be almost anything. A badger. A fox. Not big or heavy enough to be a bear. A snake, even. Mella’s toes twitched in her shoes.
    Then a breeze drifted across her face, and shecaught a hint of a familiar, dry, sulfury smell.
    â€œDragons,” she told Roger. “Wild dragons.”
    â€œOh?” Roger looked excited. “They’re rare. Have you seen them before?”
    â€œNot really,” Mella admitted. The wild common dragons were shy and came out to hunt at night, so she had only caught a glimpse or two, now and then, in the twilight forest—a scaled flank or snout behind shadowy leaves, a tail slithering through the grass.
    Now she seemed to hear rustling from all sides. A hiss teased at her ears as she turned, with a shiver, to pile her firewood in a heap at the center of the clearing. It wasn’t as if she was afraid of the little wild dragons. Of course not. Still, she felt better when Roger had struck a spark and, after much puffing and blowing, had a fire burning. She was glad as much for the cheerful light as for the warmth.
    â€œAre they related?” Roger asked as Mella found her cloak and her dragonhide gloves inside the sack she’d brought from the Inn.
    â€œWho?” Gloves on, Mella dug into the sack again and drew out the metal box her mother kept candles in. It now held the Egg. “Wild dragons and tame ones? Aye, they’re practically the same.” She wondered, as she flipped up the catch and opened the lid of the box, who the first keeper had been. Who’d first coaxed a shy wild dragon out of a thicket or a cave, fed it, learned to rub behind its ears the way dragons liked? Who’d been the first to know, deep in her bones, when a herd was hungry or frightened or threatened with sickness?
    â€œNo, I meant—well, that’s interesting too. But the true dragons. Like that one today. Are they related to the wild ones?”
    How could Mella know something like that? She lifted the Egg out of the coals she had packed around it and settled it in the heat of Roger’s fire, realizing as she did that Roger had not expected her to answer at all. He went on talking.
    â€œIt’s hard to think so. But the true ones look like your farm dragons, you have to admit. The neck, and the tail with its spike, and the shape of thehead. The wings are larger in the big ones, of course….”
    Mella stopped listening. Knees under her chin, she watched the Egg, wrapped in flame like a baby in a blanket. It had seemed dull as coal when she’d lifted it out of the box, but now, as it warmed, colors began to swirl again across its surface. Or underneath it, rather. It was as if the black shell grew translucent in the heat and let her catch a glimpse of the Egg’s heart.
    After a while she noticed that Roger had stopped talking. He was looking at her expectantly. “Have you always known?” he asked, and she realized that he was repeating the question.
    â€œKnown what?”
    â€œThat you wanted to be a keeper.”
    Mella smiled. “Always. When I was barely old enough to walk, my parents found me asleep in the dragons’