Chapter 3
ROASTED BEANS, PANIC ATTACKS—A LOVELY MORNING INDEED
Halfway across the desert, Dirk realized the sorcerer apprentice had never given him a replacement fire spell. He couldn’t conjure flame on his own, and he wouldn’t be taken seriously as a credible threat if he couldn’t breathe fire or at least appear like he could.
The baby dragon contemplated turning around.
Should he return to the tower, Bradley might ask for his help in cleaning up that wretched mess he’d vomited all over the floor, and as his Designated Sorcerer Companion, never mind his friend, Dirk would be bound to do it.
Though, the sorcerer apprentice had never once invoked the obligation of that bond, not even in the aftermath of Trial Seventeen. Or was it Thirty-Seven?
Either way, that stench had been beyond tolerable, and frankly, Dirk didn’t want to spend the day cleaning up sludge or washing clothes or watching his friend mope or catching another sheep from Calumbria for Bradley to turn into wool and thus another robe.
(He’d return the naked sheep to its shepherd as he always did, fret not.) Dirk was a baby dragon, and wrangling an obstinate sheep with a fear of flying was pushing the limits of his physical abilities.
Shirking his responsibilities always made his scales itch, so he dropped down to skim across the sand for a good exfoliating scratch. Feeling refreshed, he continued at this lower altitude until he reached the barren wilds of neighboring Leighton.
Ah, Leighton. The cursed kingdom was perfect for extortion. Hunger reigned here, and want, unfulfilled desire, and jealousy—the ideal environment for a dragon to take advantage of and grow his treasure.
But it was not without danger for the little dragon. If his wings should fail and his true nature be revealed, the citizens would stop at nothing to capture him and use his heart to heal their land.
He avoided the little hamlet with the smoldering pig shed and snuck through the scrub to a bourg on the fringes of nowhere particularly important.
On the southern edge was a quaint thatch-roof cottage, a hard-earned flower garden, and a crisp patchwork of cropland.
Bean pods, already yellowed from the heat, rattled on shriveled vines in the arid breeze. The fields were ripe for fire.
But Dirk didn’t have another fire spell. Nor did he really want to set the fields aflame—he was a dragon, not a monster. But the bean farmer didn’t know that.
Quickly, for the little dragon was very excited, he rooted around in his satchel for the appropriate spells.
They were clever pieces of magic: incantations inscribed with edible dye on thin coin-like wafers of rice paper.
Dirk, being magical himself, could simply ingest the spell and abracadabra!
He could breathe fire, disguise the color of his scales, grow wings, appear seven times his original size, or whatever he and Bradley could think up.
Incredibly handy and convincing when extorting country bumpkins.
He let two wafers dissolve on his tongue, swallowed, and got to work.
Dirk landed loudly in the front yard, a nice solid whump that was sure to be heard across the flat cropland.
Digging his claws into the parched ground, he threw his head back with a robust roar that shivered the beans in their pods.
Then he mimicked the famous pose of Tamzerin the Terrible: wings half-spread, chest out, neck arched like that of a cobra about to strike, teeth bared.
As expected, the bean farmer, his wife, and three little ones raced out of the cottage.
The bean farmer immediately snatched up the pitchfork leaning against the siding, and, after the wife screamed in surprised, she snatched up her gleeful children—“Mumma! It’s a dragon!
”—and fled back into the cottage, slamming the door shut behind her.
Locked it, too, much to her husband’s chagrin.
She did the same with the cottage shutters, yanking each set closed with military speed and precision.
In seconds, the whole cottage was as impenetrable as a coiled aardvark’s armored shell.
The bean farmer turned a milk-white face from the locked abode towards the dragon and tightened his grip on the pitchfork.
“Good morning,” Dirk greeted, his voice three octaves deeper and impressively resonant. “Nice day for a fire, isn’t it?”
“No.” The bean farmer shook his head. “It’s much too dry out.”
Dirk rolled his eyes. He’d forgotten not all humans were as brilliant as his friend in the tower. “Then it would be a shame indeed if I, a dragon, set your beans on fire, wouldn’t it?”
Now that it was spelled out for him, the bean farmer went ghostly pale. His gaze darted from the dragon to the beanstalks. To the kindling. “No!”
Dirk leaned forward, running a red tongue across sharp white teeth. “Oh, but I love a roasted bean.”
“Y-you do?” A frantic gleam shone in the bean farmer’s eyes before he whipped around and slammed straight into the front door, which was still locked. His beat his fist against it. “Open up, woman!”
“No,” came the immediate and muffled reply. “He’ll not be eating the children. Stay out there and die like a man.”
“Woman!” He crouched down so he could whisper frantically through the keyhole.
Though Dirk strained to hear what was being said, it was all nonsensical gobbledygook.
To both the dragon and the bean farmer’s surprise, the door opened, just a crack, and a heavy sack was thrust through the gap.
The door shut with another resounding thump, the scrape of a key in the lock following shortly after.
The bean farmer lurched to his feet, clutching the sack to his stomach. With an audible swallow, he thrust it out towards the dragon waiting in the yard. “Here! Roasted beans. They were for this week’s ration of soup, but please, take them.”
“Take them, aaand?” Dirk drawled, lifting his eyebrows meaningfully.
“And . . . go?” the bean farmer asked hopefully.
Rats, Dirk had walked right into that one. He’d made the farmer believe he liked—no, loved—roasted beans, and now he was being offered his favorite snack. Surely that was enough to placate him and spare the crops from the torch.
Normally, it would be. Dirk did like beans from time to time, and Bradley made a breakfast porridge from them every day.
They had use. But if Dirk accepted the sack, he’d have to return to the tower.
His satchel didn’t have the space to accommodate the beans, and no one would take him seriously if he threatened them with the claws on one paw while he held his groceries in the other. His budding reputation would be ruined.
And Dirk didn’t want to return to the tower right away.
If he came back too soon, he’d be roped into cleaning up that horrid mess left behind by the sorcerer apprentice’s stomach juices and Trial Forty-Three.
Or tasked with borrowing a sheep. Or poring over the same books over and over again in search of an answer to a curse that simply wasn’t there.
The bean farmer offered the sack with an encouraging smile, gave the beans a little jiggle.
Dirk scowled and drew himself up to his new impressive height.
“On second thought, I hate beans. They make me horribly gassy. In fact, I hate them so much, I think I’ll rid the world of their flatulent offensiveness.
” He sucked in a deep, rumbling breath through bared teeth and swung his head towards the beanstalks.
It was a bluff of course, one Dirk hoped the bean farmer wouldn’t call him on.
“Stop!”
Dirk smirked. He really was getting a handle on this whole tough-dragon persona.
“If you don’t want the roasted beans, then what do you want?”
The baby dragon discovered the limit of his patience. “What all dragons want! Coins, man! Are you dense?”
“B-but—”
“No buts!” he roared. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
“Yes! You’re Dirk the . . . the . . . the Dejected?”
Not anymore!
He was Dirk the Dangerous, but such a correction would be wasted on this dunce of a man, as it had on the pig herder.
“I am a dragon,” he bellowed, an old hurt rising and fueling his words with anger, “you are a meat sack, and I want coin. Do not make me come in there and find it!” His claws sliced through the flower garden with a spray of pink petals.
“My petunias!” came a muffled cry from within the cottage.
“I-I don’t have much,” the bean farmer stammered.
“Then I’ll take what you have and you’ll sell your beans to make up the loss. Do you know nothing about consumerism?” Dirk found himself rubbing his temples to relieve a frustration headache and dropped his paws. “I want those coins now, peasant!”
Apparently the bean farmer’s wife was as tired of her husband’s dull-wittedness as Dirk was and shoved open the nearby shutters.
She took one look at her petunias, mouth souring, and lobbed a small canvas pouch through the open window.
Then she snatched back one of her children who’d climbed to the sill to wave at the dragon and slammed the shutters shut.
Dirk released an exasperated breath. “Thank you.”
Lowering his head to retrieve the coin purse with his teeth, he stopped short at the strange click of something falling to the dirt by his paws.
A small scale, blue as the cerulean sky, sparkled up at him.
“Hey,” the bean farmer protested, “I thought you were a red dragon?”
Dirk snatched up the scale and the canvas pouch, gave the bean farmer another roar where he inflicted upon him the full horridness of his unwashed teeth, and sprang into the sky.
From this vantage point, the baby dragon spied what looked like a canyon nearby and arrowed for cover. It was no canyon at all, but a cracked riverbed. There was no water here, any reeds shriveled to threads and not worth the munching by ruminants. It was safe, obscure, and utterly boring.
Perfect for a little dragon fighting off a panic attack.
Refuge was found in a tangle of mummified roots worming through a section of eroded riverbank.
The two wafer spells wore off just in time to shrink him back to his original size and restore the natural timbre of his voice, not that he needed a change in vocal cords to hide.
Concealed within the twisty shadows of the roots, Dirk opened his paw to examine the blue scale and found a petunia petal impaled on one claw.
Something twisted in his stomach at the sight of that beautiful, delicate thing shriveling in the ungodly heat. Of the innocent ruined flowers he’d left behind.
Dirk quickly wiggled the petal free of his claw and focused on the real cause for misgivings.
From its size and the way it had fallen when he’d stretched out his neck to retrieve the money purse, he guessed this cerulean coin was one of the scales normally hidden beneath his mane feathers.
So the gap would go unnoticed by Bradley and easily forgotten by him—out of sight was out of mind, after all. Just like the two scales before it.
He poked it around in his paw with a claw, searching for deformities or any hint as to why he was suddenly shedding scales.
And by sudden, he meant one scale about every month since their arrival in Ashburnum.
To his knowledge, dragons didn’t shed their scales; their scales grew with them.
But not many dragons of his particular species ever traveled west of Bellafont’s moist climes, so maybe it was the new environment?
Or secondhand pressure from Bradley’s curse research and remedies? Was he expending too much luck?
His feathered mane flared and flattened on repeat for a few cycles with each speculation.
He really ought to confide in his best friend, but the sorcerer apprentice wasn’t a dragon expert, and if Dirk knew anything about Bradley Donmarin, it was the intensity of his OCD.
And his heart. He’d become fixated on trying to help Dirk at the expense of breaking his own curse, and that simply would not do.
Half their time in the tower was already gone.
It would be best for Dirk to keep this to himself.
The baby dragon’s scales grew itchy, so he shimmied between the bigger roots to alleviate the discomfort. Then he slipped the blue scale into his satchel along with the coin purse. The jingling of coins brightened his mood considerably. More treasure for his tub; a morning well spent indeed.
And a prosperous afternoon to be had, if he could shake off the misgivings brought on by the shed scale.
It’s just stress, he told himself, wiggling free of the roots.
How many baby dragons do you know who’ve started their own racketeering business before they were four years old?
No one, that’s who. Why, you don’t even have your barbels yet.
You’re a pioneer, Dirk my lad, and blazing a new trail is not without a few hiccups.
Plus this desert air isn’t doing you any favors.
Bolstered by his pep talk, the baby dragon checked both his wings and scale coloration—all was in order—before following the cracked riverbed further inland in search of more enterprising opportunities.