As she thought the question, something in the helmet found the answer. His sweat was full of chemicals, tiny jigsaw pieces that locked into receptors in her nose in a perfect mating process. Was this was lust felt like? She'd never been attracted to a man before. To whom was she supposed to be attracted? The brutish slaves the sun-dragons hunted for sport? The thuggish dockworkers that populated Richmond? Human men had always seemed so animalistic when compared to the refined and mannerly dragons. Now, the idea of being an animal found a certain resonance within her. Her heart raced as she took a long, deep breath of Pet's scent. She closed her eyes, feeling her body melting into his arms.
Was this so bad? What could this lead to?
The helmet suddenly flooded her mind with what it could lead to. She jerked her eyes opened and pushed Pet away.
"Enough hugging," she said. "There's work to be done."
Pet looked a little hurt. She swung around, unable to face him, certain that her lust was written in tall clear letters on her face. She was tempted to remove her helmet. What was the advantage of having sharpened senses if she lost all control of them? But was it so bad to lose control? Eventually, she would experience intimacy with a man, and Pet wasn't such a bad candidate. He brushed his teeth, kept his nails trimmed, and seemed to be fairly experienced. Who better to learn from?
She closed her eyes and clenched her fists, feeling her nails pressing into her palms. This had to stop.
"I'm leaving the castle," she said. "There's too much I need to do."
"What?" asked Pet. "Right now? It's after midnight. The only thing we need to do is get to bed."
She shook her head. "I'm too keyed up after the attacks to sleep. I had planned to leave soon to find Bit… to find Zeeky. She told me she was from a village known as Big Lick. I want to make sure she gets home safely."
"Why is this so urgent?" Pet asked.
"There's just a lot to do. I want to see Zeeky, I want to find out what happened to Ven's body, and now Blasphet's on the loose. The only one I have any real information about is Zeeky. I'll go find her, get that out of the way, and then come back." Hopefully, by the time she returned, her senses would no longer be so erratic.
"I need you here," Pet said. "We both know you're the smart one. I need you at the summit."
"You'll be fine," said Jandra. "You stood up to the dragons just now. You… you're a better man than you think you are."
Hex approached them as they spoke. "Pardon my interruption. If you wish to travel, I volunteer as your transportation. It was never my intention to linger here at the castle. I possess a powerful lust to see the world."
Jandra's cheeks tingled at the word "lust." But with Hex flying her, the journey to find Zeeky and the real Bitterwood might only take a few days. Perhaps by then she could trust herself to work with Pet without risking becoming another of his conquests.
"Hex," she said, "It would be an honor. Do you need anything before we go?"
"I arrived with only the scales on my back and so I shall depart. There is nothing I need that the forests and the streams cannot provide."
"Wonderful. I travel light as well," she said, fingering the pouch of silver dust that hung on her belt. If she needed a change of clothes, she would simply weave them from materials at hand. In fact, her skirt seemed a little impractical for dragon-riding. She ran her fingers along the velvety cloth, willing it to transform. The fabric responded almost instantly, reweaving itself into a pair of riding pants.
"Wow," said Pet. "I didn't know you could do that. Change your clothes just by thinking."
"I've been able to transmute matter for a while," she said. "I've just gotten better at it."
"Do you, uh, take off your clothes the same way? Just think about at it and, whoosh, they fall off? Because that's just… I mean-" Pet's voice trailed off dreamily.
"Take care, Pet," she said as Hex crouched, giving her access to his broad back.
She glanced toward Pet as she straddled Hex's neck, grasping his mane of long feather-scales. She was out of range of Pet's aroma once Hex rose to his normal height. Pet didn't look as delicious as he had a second before. He looked a little pathetic, actually, small from where she sat on the back of a dragon. Which only made it all the more urgent to her that she not be near him should her senses run wild again.
"Let's go, Hex," she said.
Hex ran forward, spreading his wings. With a flap they were airborne and Jandra clenched her knees, holding on for her life.
Jandra had never ridden a sun-dragon before. When she was younger, she'd often flown with Vendevorex, riding in a harness strapped to his chest, looking out over the world upside-down. But once she'd gone through the growth spurt of puberty, she'd become too heavy for him to carry easily, and slowly she'd come to accept that she'd spend her adulthood earthbound.
Hex carried her across the night sky as if she was weightless. Sun-dragons' enormous wings had always reminded her of sails. Sun-dragons moved through the air the way ships sailed across the water, slowly, taking turns in great arcs. Sky-dragons moved more like fish, darting and flashing in any direction with the speed of thought.
As Jandra watched the moonlit landscape unfolding beneath her, she suddenly found a deep appreciation of the sun-dragon's command over the air. The relative slowness of their flight felt graceful, as if they were drifting down a river of wind, with Hex's wings carefully dipping and tilting in the current. From time to time he would beat his broad wings. His powerful muscles rippled beneath Jandra's legs as they climbed into the sky. She felt as if they must be miles above the earth. Yet, even as she thought this, her brain began to buzz as her helm gathered various bits of data-the angle of the crescent moon above in comparison to the size and shape Hex's shadow below-and a string of numbers flashed through her mind to inform her they were roughly three hundred yards above the countryside.
The terrain below was mostly gentle hills. It was late fall and most of the trees had shed their leaves. Cottages and barns dotted the hills; rail fences divided the land into large parcels, marking the boundaries of farms. It seemed odd that the earth should look so peaceful, with Albekizan's castle so near. Most humans had returned home after the battle of the Free City. It mattered little to them who sat upon the throne. They would continue their daily lives of raising families, planting, harvesting, and trading goods.
Vendevorex had told her long ago that humans benefited from the rule of sun-dragons. War had become a thing that dragons waged against other dragons. The armies that dragon kings amassed weren't aimed primarily at the oppression of humans, but at protecting themselves from the threats posed by other dragons. It was true that, under the law, humans owned nothing. They were legally little more than parasites upon the king's property. All the products of their labors could be taken from them on a whim. But, in practice, most humans were allowed to live their lives unmolested. The human arts of farming and tending livestock had never been activities dragons embraced. Humans produced food, the dragons took their portion, and beyond this most people spent their lives catching only the occasional glimpse of dragons. In return, humans lived in a state of relative peace. They weren't allowed to amass armies. The ruling sun-dragons would quickly quash any human militia before it could become a threat. While humans did skirmish with neighboring villages from time to time, most humans spent their lives never having to pick up a weapon to use against a fellow man. For centuries, there had been no human-against-human battle that involved more than a few dozen men. This time in history, Vendevorex had told her, was known as the Pax Draco-the Peace of Dragons.