“I suppose most would.”
She glanced back at the house. “I’m going to go see what our mother might tell me to do next. You finish whatever you need to get done, and then we can head into the city.”
“I don’t think that it’s going to happen today,” I said.
“If we wait too long—” she started, but didn’t get to finish.
“Ashan?”
I jerked my head around. The panic in my mother’s voice was almost palpable.
I went running toward the house. “Mom? What happened?”
She glanced over to Alison, strolling over to us. “Have you seen your father?”
I frowned, shaking my head. “I haven’t seen him. I’ve been working.”
“He said that he was going to come out and help you.”
Dad helping out meant he’d wandered off again. It was my turn to find him.
“I’ll go look for him,” I said.
“If he came outside, he should be in the barn.”
I looked over to the barn. The massive doors were closed, and the bar of iron set down to lock it. We had been working along the fence, and if he had come out, he would have seen us.
“I could help,” Alison offered.
Our mother frowned at her. “I’m going to need your help inside. Thenis had another accident, and I think it would be better if the two of us clean him up.”
Stark hopelessness slid across Alison’s face. “Of course, Mother.”
She followed our mom back to the house, and I turned, looking around the farm. There weren’t too many places that our father would be able to hide. The farm wasn’t large enough for him to disappear entirely. Still, the fact that he had gotten outside was troubling . I made a circle around the house, jogging slowly as I called out for him. There was no sign of him.
I darted over to the barn, pulling open the door, wondering if maybe she was right and he had come out here, but there was no sign of him in the barn. The horses all looked up at me, whinnying as if they were trying to tell me it was feeding time. I shook my head, but decided to hurry to Adela. I saddled her quickly and guided her outside.
From there, I climbed into the saddle, and we started off. I sat up tall , looking around, but didn’t see any sign of where my father might have run off to. When I reached the King’s Road, I found the empty, rutted path stretching out in either direction, and no sign of my father. Could he have seen the caravan and decided to follow it?
I turned Adela and set her off at a rapid trot, moving as quickly as she could. She was a workhorse, and wasn’t necessarily the swiftest animal that we had. She was stable, safe, and she was the most reliable , but I wondered if maybe I should have taken one of our other horses. In the distance, a lone figure with a slight limp ambled along the road
Father.
I nudged the horse on her sides, and Adela took off, surging forward. It didn’t take long until we caught up to him.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I asked, pulling up alongside him and climbing out of the saddle.
“Ashan?” His brow wrinkled in confusion. He looked up at the sky, cupping his hand over his brow. “I could’ve sworn I saw something. I came out here to look.”
I grunted. “What do you think you saw?”
“ A dragon.”
I looked to the sky, and for a moment, the dark shadow I’d seen the other day came back to me. I knew better than to entertain those ideas with my father. “There haven’t been any dragons out here,” I said. “I’ve been working outside most of the day, and I would’ve seen one if there was.”
“It’s not so much a matter of seeing them, as it is feeling them. You know how to feel the dragons, don’t you?”
I laughed softly at the idea that I could feel a dragon, though the serious look on my father’s face suggested it wasn’t a joke to him. “I don’t know if I could feel a dragon, either.”
“You have to open yourself to them. It’s a matter of steadying your breathing, and feeling for the heat within you. It feels like your insides are aflame. That’s the only way, Ashan.” He turned to me, as he flicked his gaze over to the horse for a moment, and he smiled. “You brought Adela.”
His tone made him sound like he was having a moment of clarity, but the way he spoke of dragons had the ring of delusions.
“What were you saying about feeling dragons?”
“I was saying that if you get close enough to them, that you can feel them. Dragons are unique animals, you know.”
I tried to turn him, but he pulled against me. There were times when he couldn’t move very well, where his legs didn’t seem as if they functioned the way they should, and he relied upon the braces at his knees to keep him upright. There were other times when it seemed as if his old strength had returned completely.
This was the latter. He pulled away from me as I tried to grab him so I could bring him back to the farmhouse.
“Come on, Dad. I have more work to get done today.” I forced a smile. “You could help. I imagine that it would go a lot faster if the two of us worked on it.”
“If you have chores to do, then you need to get them done by yourself,” he said. “You can’t ask others to do your work for you, Ashan.”
I pushed down my
