She peered into the kitchen. Sarah and Pema were cleaning the counters.
“Come in,” the cook said when she saw Lucinda. “Have some lemonade.” Sarah took a pitcher out of the refrigerator while Lucinda got herself a glass. “I hear you are going to eine Feier!” she said as Lucinda drank.
“What’s that? A fire?”
“ Eine Feier -a celebration. Tomorrow. You have invited been. It is a Fourth of July celebration at the other farm, with the children.”
Which sounded okay if it was the kids they’d met in the diner, the Carrillos. At least they were more or less the same age as Tyler and her.
Lucinda rinsed out her glass and put the lemonade back, then wandered out to the front of the house. The porch was empty, the gravel-covered drive spreading in front of her. What she really wanted to do was go see some animals-the unicorns, maybe, although they frightened her more than a little. She couldn’t forget that horn flashing past her face like the breathless swish of a sword blade. And they were so wild! She could imagine them leaping over any fence they wanted to, no matter how high, as free and uncaged as clouds.
Lucinda ambled over to the henhouse. Tyler was in a foul mood.
“Did you hide the… the thing?” He opened his hands like he was playing charades. Book.
She rolled her eyes. “Of course.” She looked at him for a moment, pushing soapy water back and forth across the disgusting floor of the henhouse. The smell of the place was revolting. To her astonishment, though, she heard herself ask, “Do you want some help?”
He stopped scrubbing long enough to stare, as if some alien being had taken his sister’s place. “Nah, I can’t. I have to do it myself-the Wicked Witch told me. She’s mad at me for exploring.” He smiled. “But thanks.”
She was on her way back from the henhouse when she saw Colin Needle in the distance, crouching by the door of the Sick Barn, examining the door latch.
“Hello, Colin,” she said. He jumped up like he’d been burned.
“Oh! Hello, Lucinda. Nice to see you.” He waved his hands-at nothing, as far as she could tell. “Can’t stop to chat just now-loads to do. Sorry!” He hurried past her, back toward the house, his stiff strides much more rapid than usual, like a man on stilts hurrying to find a bathroom.
Lucinda reached out. The door to the Sick Barn was open. She wondered why he’d been examining it so carefully. She cautiously stuck her head in. “Hello?” When she heard no answer, she stepped inside.
At first she thought there was no one else in the great high-ceilinged barn except her and the vast, unmoving bulk of the dragon, stretched in its long pen like a ship docked for repairs. The idea of being alone with such a monster was enough to make her back toward the door.
“Miss?” The farmhand Haneb was coming toward her from the other end of the barn, bulky from the neck down in a baggy gray safety suit. His lanky black hair hung in his face and he held his head at an odd angle to hide his scars.
“Do you come for the boy Colin, miss?” he asked her. “He has gone. Or for the master Walkwell or the master Ragnar? They are both gone also, to fetch more medicine.”
“Medicine?” She let the door fall shut behind her. As it banged closed a deep rumble came up from the pen in response, a sound that made Lucinda’s insides vibrate beneath her ribs. “Is she still sick? I thought she was all right.”
“Meseret?” He shook his head sadly, still carefully keeping the scarred side away from her. “We do not know. Perhaps it is just the sadness of her egg… that it dies…” He shrugged, struggling to find words. “To learn more, next week we give her… give her
… ” He frowned. “Sleeping medicine. Then we take away egg, so Mr. Walkwell and Mr. Gideon can study it.”
It was by far the most she had ever heard Haneb say.
Lucinda stared at the pen, trying to look braver than she felt. Just the size of the dragon, its back corrugated with scales like an alligator’s but wide as a bus, made it hard for Lucinda to get her breath. Being this near to something so big and alive was terrifying beyond explanation. If Meseret made a sudden movement, Lucinda knew, she would turn and run out of the barn, no matter how embarrassed she would be about it later.
The dragon lay with her egg between her forelegs like an exhausted puppy with a favorite toy. The rest of her immense body was stretched, belly down, to the far end of the pen, her great hind legs all but invisible under the swell of her pale, shiny belly. The egg was startlingly small, no bigger around at its base than a basketball, although its narrow, oblong shape made it almost twice that big. It was bizarre to think something so big as Meseret could start out smaller than a sleeping bag. Then, as Lucinda saw the mother dragon’s sagging, yellowed eye, she remembered again that this egg wouldn’t be growing up to be anything.
“Poor thing,” she said, almost to herself, stepping closer. Haneb carefully moved to Lucinda’s left side as they stood at the railing. “She seems so exhausted. Like she’s just given up.” She looked at Meseret’s eye, mostly closed but still fascinating, inescapable. “Is everyone sure the egg isn’t alive?”
“Yes,” said Haneb, then hesitated. “If you want, I show you Mr. Gideon’s magic, same I showed Master Colin.”
When she nodded, he pulled a fireproof hood with a plastic face shield over his head, then shyly took Lucinda’s arm with his thickly gloved hand and led her along the edge of the dragon pen to an old metal desk and a laptop computer. The dragon didn’t move, but her huge, half-lidded eye shifted slightly to watch Lucinda-yes, to watch her, not Haneb, she felt oddly sure. Was it just because she was unfamiliar? Lucinda stood on her tiptoes and leaned over the rail. The fire-colored eye widened, just a little, but it was enough for Lucinda to feel quite boneless in her legs. She let herself back down again-slowly.
Meseret’s head was the size of a small sports car, a great wedge of bone and scale and teeth with backswept fins growing from just behind the orbits around her eyes. Her neck was long and muscular, but quickly spread out into the shoulders and the huge, folded membranes of her wings, which grew in a batlike flare (as far as Lucinda could tell-it was hard to make out many details with the dragon lying down) between the uppermost toes of her forelegs and the top of her hips. The bottom two toes on each side, scarcely thicker than Lucinda’s arms but long as tree branches, provided the struts on which the wing skin stretched, like paper over the balsa- wood bones of a kite. For a moment Lucinda longed to touch the near wing-it seemed so delicate, a translucent banner of flesh next to the castle of craggy hide.
Haneb clumped past her in his strange suit. With his hood on he looked like a robot out of an ancient science-fiction movie. He held some kind of plastic wand in one hand, attached by a curly cord to a plastic box about the size and shape of a briefcase. He looked so strange and moved so slowly, she almost expected him to vault over the walls of the pen like an astronaut in reduced gravity, but instead he fumbled open the gate with his free hand and trudged inside.
Meseret rumbled again. Lucinda felt the sound from the soles of her feet upward, but when it finished a curious vibration remained in her skull, as though her brain was still bouncing from the dragon’s low growl. She realized after a few moments that the hair on her neck and arms was standing up, her skin tingling.
She couldn’t believe how small Haneb was compared to the bulk of the dragon-Meseret had raised her head a little and the top of his hood barely reached the bottom of her rolling eye! “Oh, be careful!” she said, but she doubted he could hear her.
Haneb knelt beside the egg. The dragon’s rumble went up in pitch, but Haneb did not slow or stop. He extended the wand toward the egg until it was only a few inches away, then moved it even more slowly forward until it touched the waxy shell.
Lucinda suddenly realized what he was doing-it was one of those ultrasound things, like they used on pregnant women-and turned toward the desk and the computer screen. The black-and-white image was moving and changing, a murky, confusing mess that only gradually resolved itself into something like a huge wad of chewed gum wrapped in cellophane-the baby with its wings folded around it, she guessed. The picture was completely still. When Haneb stopped moving the wand there was no other movement: the thing in the egg might have been stone.
“Oh!” she said, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. How terrible! The tiny baby dragon, dead in its egg that way, never to see light or feel the air. “Oh, no. The poor little thing!”
Meseret’s vast eye turned to Lucinda again, a red-gold ball with a thin black slit that went all the way from the top to the bottom. The buzzing in Lucinda’s head intensified, as though whatever was stuck in there had just discovered there was no way out and was beginning to get angry. Lucinda tried to look away, but the eye seemed
