Dragonseed by James Maxey Page B

from my family when I was four. Chapelion selected me because he thought the color of my hair went well with the décor. I’ve been whipped a hundred times, for little things, like getting ink smudges on a sheet of parchment. I can’t pull my shoulders all the way straight because of the scars.”
    He looked at Vance. “I’m one of the men your brother died to free. If I ever have children, they’ll be free because of him. I promise every one of them will understand the price that was paid.”
    Vance responded with a brave, thin smile.
    Anza raised her hand toward her cheek, as if to wipe away a tear, but turned her face away before Jandra could focus on it.
    Jandra looked back at the mound of skulls. She felt the pressure of all their empty stares, accusing. Bitterwood had tried to tell her that peace with dragons wasn’t possible. Even Pet, before he died, had preached that war was the only answer. Burke, the smartest man she’d ever met, didn’t believe that dragons and men could ever share the earth.
    So why was she cradling a dragon as if it were her own blood? Why, with the world so obviously split by this enormous rift between men and dragons, was she still straddling the chasm?
    The world was broken. This pyramid of death bore plain testament to that. And yet, some tiny, small voice inside whispered that if she could only get her powers back, it wasn’t too late to fix the world, to patch back together all the broken pieces and spare both man and dragon from the dark days coming.
    “Let’s ride on,” said Jandra. “I’m not tired at all.”

    BURKE WOKE TO feverish heat and darkness. He felt as if his brain had swollen to three times its normal size and was threatening to split his skull. He was awash in sweat. Invisible ants were crawling over his whole body, from scalp to toes.
    Toes.
    Since Charkon had broken his right leg, he’d not felt the toes of that foot, or anything much below his hip. Now, his leg felt restored—not good, for it was subject to the same fevered agony that plagued the rest of his body—but at least it felt like part of his body once more, not simply dead meat hanging from his hip.
    Why hadn’t Biscuit performed the amputation? He ran his hands beneath the heavy wool blankets down his right hip. The steel splint he’d fashioned was gone. His fingers traveled further, and found bandages.
    His leg ended only six inches below his hip.
    While his mind felt ghostly toes wiggling, his fingers revealed the truth. Biscuit had done what needed to be done. Burke let out a long, slow, shuddering breath. He felt a pang of loss as sharp and clear as if he were at his own funeral. He swallowed hard, feeling tears rising. He hadn’t cried since he was six. His brothers had long ago pummeled this weakness out of him. He sniffed and clenched his jaw, fighting the urge to surrender to the grief. He closed his eyes tightly, grateful that he was alone in his bedroom. He was certain that if anyone had been here with him, he would have burst into tears. This feeling turned out to be wrong.
    “It’s been a long time, Kanati,” a raspy voice said by his bedside.
    Burke sucked in a sharp gasp of air; his heart jumped around in his chest like a startled rabbit. He sat straight up, his eyes wide, searching the darkness for his mysterious visitor. By his bed sat a figure in a dark cloak, his face hidden by a hood. Burke was a rational man; until this moment he’d had no fear of some anthropomorphic manifestation of death coming to carry him away. His throat, wet with unshed tears only seconds before, went as dry as the parched fields around Conyers in the decade of drought.
    “Who are you?” he tried to say. His lips moved, but only the barest sound came out.
    The figure pulled back his hood, revealing an old man, his hair thin and gray, his skin wrinkled and leathery. “Have I changed so much?”
    Burke stared at the visitor. There was something familiar about his eyes. “Bant?” he asked,