27. Max
Max
The next morning Drakken came to our door in full dress uniform.
He didn’t explain himself. He crouched, and my sister climbed onto his shoulders. Off they went through the fortress, Missy waving at people they passed like a girl on a parade float.
The market lanes stopped doing business. A baker came out onto her step with flour to the elbows. Two off-duty soldiers went so rigid at attention they nearly hurt themselves.
At the school gate, he didn’t put her down.
He carried her straight through it and into the playground, in front of every child and every parent at drop-off, and then the dragon of the Zodiac Covenant spent the next hour losing gravely at hopscotch.
He pushed the swing. Children who’d kept their distance from Missy came drifting across the yard in ones and twos, unable to help themselves, and formed a ring around him like a congregation.
“Can your dragon fly in the rain?” A boy of about eight, with a healing split in his lip.
“Yes,” Drakken said. “It’s like a shower.”
“Does he eat people?”
“Sometimes, when he’s annoyed.”
Kids laughed and then thought better of it.
The bullying stopped that day. It didn’t take long for Missy to become the center of the playground, exactly what she was always going to be, once they let her.
My sister could conquer any adult on sight. Winning over kids had taken her time and reinforcements. She’d spent all six and a half of her years among adults in a mine, and children were the one country she’d never been allowed to visit.
And now things were changing for her, day by ordinary day.
I meant to stand guard over every ordinary minute of it.