The Broken World by J.D. Oswald

and worn, but a fire that could have rendered a man to ash would have surely melted it. Even the magical fire he had conjured to dispose of the dead Llanwennog villagers had burned with a terrible heat.
    ‘How is it this coin survived intact? Why isn’t the grass burned?’
    ‘The Fflam Gwir burns only dead flesh and bone and scale. As we come from the Grym, so it takes us back when we are dead.’ Frecknock sounded like she was reciting a passage from a litany.
    ‘Then how do you account for Osgal’s burns? How could Benfro produce this flame in the aethereal?’
    ‘I truly do not know, Your Grace. He should not be
able to breathe fire at all. This is something I’ve never encountered before.’
    Melyn could see Frecknock’s fear as she spoke, and it made him feel better. She knew how precarious her position was; knew that she could be killed in an instant should she stop being useful. Admitting that there was something she didn’t know meant that her end was a little bit closer.
    ‘Well then, let us hurry into town before my warrior priests kill everyone. Perhaps one of the good citizens of Cerdys will be able to shed some light on the matter.’
    Dafydd didn’t know who was the more astonished, the dragon, Usel or himself. They all stood motionless, staring at each other for long moments. It seemed as if the chittering forest noise and babble of the stream had been cut off. It was Iolwen who finally broke the stillness.
    ‘Um. Hello?’ She spoke in Llanwennog, taking a single pace forward from their group and opening her arms wide in a gesture of peace. The dragon said something incomprehensible. Its voice was melodic, almost hypnotizing, and though he couldn’t understand the words, Dafydd thought he would be happy to listen to it for ever. Then Usel spoke, and his words were a crude imitation of the dragon’s, halting and uncertain but clearly the same language. Dafydd heard his own name, and Iolwen’s, and assumed that they were being introduced to the beast.
    She replied with a smile and a nod. He didn’t know how, but he understood then the dragon was female. He had only ever seen one of her kind before, at a circus many years earlier. That creature had been male and nothing like as large or splendid as this one. Her scales glistened
in the evening sunshine, reflecting a thousand different colours. Her tail coiled around her massive legs like some tame snake, its tip pointed and spiky. Long sharp talons sprang from her feet, and her fingers ended in lethal claw-like nails. Narrow fangs protruded past her lips, white as bone against the darkness of her face. She was fierce and yet also somehow unthreatening.
    Dafydd listened as she spoke some more unintelligible words in that strange lilting accent. He felt at peace, relaxed and calm. The whole clearing was a safe place, a magic place.
    ‘But this is wonderful.’ Usel’s words broke through Dafydd’s reverie, bringing him back to the real world with a start. How long had he drifted? He had no idea. But somehow he had taken Iolwen’s hand in his own.
    ‘You can speak to her?’ he asked.
    ‘After a fashion. My Draigiaith is very poor, and she speaks a dialect I’ve never heard before. But I think I get the gist of her story. She’s lost. One moment she was flying over the forests, searching the islands for more of her kin, the next she was in a land she didn’t recognize. When she approached a town of men for help, they pursued her with weapons and magic, tried to kill her. She escaped and flew here, feeling the call of this place. But the carving puzzles her. She knows of no reason why anyone should have created it. No dragon has ever courted such veneration, she tells me. Her mistress would be appalled.’
    ‘Her mistress? Who could command such a creature? Does this dragon have a name?’ Dafydd’s questions bubbled out of him as if he had no control over his actions.
    ‘She is Merriel, daughter of Earith. At least I think
that’s what