“I thought I wanted to be home,” Jason said. “I returned to my village because of my mother and my sister.” It wasn’t the only reason he’d returned, and after uncovering what happened to his father, he had thought he might be able to have answers and bring some sense of peace to his mother, but how could he when she still suffered? She wasn’t able to move past what had happened to his father and wasn’t able to heal herself, let alone anyone else. She’d been caught up in her own trauma and had not been able to overcome it.
The people of their village had been through enough over the years that most people were far heartier than his mother. That troubled Jason, though he never said anything to her. It was better for him to hunt, to bring the food she needed, and then wander out of the village.
“I don’t know who my hatch mates are.”
“Hatch mates?”
The dragon breathed out. It seemed as if steam and ice showered out of his nostrils with it. “There are others like me. I can feel them.”
Jason scooted forward, wanting to get closer to the dragon. “I could help with that, too.”
“How?”
“If you can feel them, we can search for them.” It wasn’t altogether surprising that Therin would have hidden other dragon eggs, but from what Jason understood, it was rare enough for dragons to lay an egg, so how could there be so many hatch mates?
The dragon likely wouldn’t know. The other dragons—if they even survived—would be elsewhere. Jason doubted they would be on the same mountain, and without knowing where Therin had traveled, he wouldn’t be able to determine where Therin had left the other eggs.
“I feel they survived, but nothing more than that,” the dragon said.
“Can we follow what you can feel?”
Any move he would make would carry him out of the village, and he should know better than to do that, and yet, he thought it would be beneficial to go with the dragon, to search for these other dragons. If he could find them before the Dragon Souls, if they were aware they existed, he wanted to do that.
The dragon rumbled, and Jason didn’t know whether that indicated that he could follow or not. He continued watching the dragon, but the dragon seemed to settle into a slumber.
For his part, Jason was tired. He’d been up for most of the day, and having chased after Angus, rescuing him, and then heading back up the mountain, he was exhausted. What would it hurt to rest?
He might be able to make it back to the village tonight, but doing so meant he would brave the wind and the storm. He might not struggle nearly as much as he once had against either of those, but he didn’t want to face the weather if he didn’t have to.
It was better to stay here.
And if the dragon wanted to be quiet, then there was no point in trying to force the creature to talk.
He settled down, resting his head on his arm, and he drifted. Dreams came to him, though they were little more than stirrings of memories. In them, he caught images, those of his father, of times in the village, but other times as well. In one image, he was riding on a dragon, and rather than the warmth of the dragon Henry traveled with, it was cold, almost painfully so. When he stirred awake, he looked over, expecting to find himself sitting on the ice dragon, but the dragon was gone.
He sat up and looked toward the entrance of the cave.
There was no sign of the dragon. It was almost as if he’d had a dream, and in that dream, he had experienced the dragon. Light drifted in the entrance of the cave. How long had he slept? It didn’t feel as if it was restive, and yet he thought that he been out for quite some time.
He looked down at the stream for a moment before deciding the dragon had disappeared again, leaving him.
He slipped along the edge of the stretch of earth before stepping into the daylight. The sun was bright overhead and a blue sky greeted him. It was rare to have days like this. On a day like this, snow would melt in the village. Streets would become slick with ice, and yet, there would be great celebration. There was something peaceful and relaxing about skies like this.
He searched for any sign of the dragon but found nothing.
Jason checked his bow and quiver and started up the slope. It didn’t take long before he reached the outer edge of the village.
He paused, thinking he’d failed his family. He’d come out to hunt and hadn’t managed to find anything. That meant returning was a mistake. There was enough food left from the last rabbit he’d caught, but they needed to stay on top of things, otherwise they would run out of meat. He didn’t want his family to go hungry. There had been enough days where they’d not had nearly enough food to eat, and he didn’t want to go through that again.
He paused first at his home. The room was warm, and he thought that his mother or sister had been burning far too much dung, but found neither of them here.
Why would they waste heat if they weren’t even here?
He checked the back room, but his mother wasn’t there. There was no sign of anyone, and yet, he thought that they must be somewhere.
Jason left his bow and quiver and headed back out.
On a day like this, there were often more people out in the streets than usual. It didn’t surprise him to come across a group of kids racing through the streets, chasing each other, coats flapping behind them as if unmindful of the cold. They probably didn’t mind the cold. There wasn’t much to it, at least not today.
He meandered, searching for where his mother and sister would’ve gone, but didn’t find any sign of them. He nodded to the few familiar faces, and paused at the local butcher.
Master Erich had been friendlier to Jason since he’d been more successful in hunting, but he still wasn’t willing to trade with him openly. Jason wasn’t a part of the hunting party that would head out of the village, taking the back slope, and because of that, he was treated differently. He wasn’t large enough to go with them, and most felt that he was useless. He’d tried hunting in that direction in the past, but he had to travel farther than the others, and finding a place that wasn’t already overhunted was difficult. It was part of the reason he went down the front face of the mountain. At least that way, anything he might find would be his. It made it more difficult to hunt, but it also left him alone, which was the way he liked it.
He reached the central part of the village, the festival grounds, and paused. There wasn’t much here for him, either, yet he was left with memories. This was where he had worked with his father, learning how to manage the cannon, a cannon he would never be allowed to fire on his own. That wasn’t in his future, though the longer he was around the dragon, the more he wondered what was really going to be in his future.
A familiar face loomed into view. Tessa was lovely. She had dark hair, and she styled it differently than usual today, her black hair tucked underneath a dragonskin hat.
She smiled as he neared, watching him. “Jason. I don’t see you nearly as often as I once did.”
He smiled at her. There was a time when he and Tessa were much closer. He didn’t think his father’s death was the reason they had grown apart, and didn’t blame her for his father’s loss, not the way he once would have. Still, there was a distance now between them.
“I’ve been hunting.”
“Successfully, from what I hear.”
He nodded. “Mostly. It takes me away, but for my sister and my mother…”
Tessa’s face clouded. “And how is your mother?”
“About the same. She doesn’t change much these days.”
“I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do…”