Sirinita nodded.
“Then leave well enough alone for now. We’ll go out in the morning and see what’s what. Or if this Tharn comes to the door and speaks fair – we’ve the girl to tell us if it’s the right one.”
The man took one reluctant final look out the door, then closed and barred it, while the woman soothed Sirinita and led her to a corner by the fire where she could lie down. The man found two blankets and a feather pillow, and Sirinita curled up, shivering, certain she would never sleep again.
She was startled to wake up to broad daylight.
“You told us the truth last night,” her hostess remarked.
Sirinita blinked sleep from her eyes.
“About your dragon, I mean. He’s curled up out front. At first my man was afraid to step past him, after what you’d said about his fighting those two men, but he looks harmless enough, so at last he ventured it.”
“I’m sorry he troubled you,” Sirinita said.
“No trouble,” she said.
“I have to get home,” Sirinita said, as she sat up.
“No hurry, is there?”
Sirinita hesitated. “It’s a long walk back to the city.”
“It is,” the woman admitted. “But isn’t that all the more reason to have breakfast first?”
Sirinita, who had had no supper the night before, did not argue with that; she ate a hearty meal of hot buttered cornbread, apples, and cider.
When she was done she tried to feed Tharn, but the dragon wasn’t hungry.
When the farmer showed her what he had found in the cornfield she saw why. Both her attackers were sprawled there – or at any rate, what was left of them. Tharn was still a very small dragon; he had left quite a bit.
She looked down at the dragon at her side; Tharn looked up at her and blinked. He stretched his wings and belched a small puff of flame.
“Come on,” Sirinita said. She waved a farewell to her hosts – she never had learned their names, though she thought they’d been mentioned – then started walking up her own shadow, heading westward toward Ethshar.
It was late afternoon when, footsore and frazzled, she reached Eastgate with Tharn still at her heel. She made her way down East Road to the city’s heart, then turned south into the residential district that had always been her home.
Her parents were waiting.
“When you weren’t home by midnight we were worried, so this morning we hired a witch,” her mother explained, after embraces and greetings had been exchanged. “She said you’d be home safe some time today, and here you are.” She looked past her daughter at the dragon. “And Tharn, too, I see.” She hesitated, then continued, “The witch said that Tharn saved your life last night. We really can’t keep him here, Siri, but we can find a home for him somewhere…”
“No,” Sirinita interrupted, hugging her mother close. “No, don’t do that.” She closed her eyes, and images of the man with the burned face screaming, the other man with his hair on fire and his neck broken, the two of them lying half-eaten between the rows of corn, appeared.
Tharn had been protecting her, and those men had meant to rape her and maybe kill her, but she knew those images would always be there.
Tharn was a dragon, and that was what dragons did.
“No, Mother,” she said, shuddering, tears leaking from the corners of her tightly-shut eyes. “Get a wizard and have him killed.”
